Germ

seventy-six

Kendrick Reynolds leaned on his cane in a room few people knew existed and fewer had ever seen. Egg-shaped, like the three more famous rooms above it, this one lay forty feet below the bottom floor of the White House proper. Spartan by Pennsylvania Avenue standards, it resembled a reading room in a men's club, with dark leather wing chairs and ottomans arranged in conversation-conducive clusters. A Biedermeier sofa and a simple coffee table dominated the center of the room. Having escaped the decorating budgets of a succession of First Ladies, its walls were white; the two dozen or so original paintings that hung from them represented little-known experiments of brutal gore or obscene sexuality by such modern masters as Eakins, Rodin, and de Kooning. If she could have laid eyes on the room, Reynolds's wife would have proclaimed it evidence of the male gender's inability to reconcile masculinity and culture.

More important than the room's aesthetics, thought Reynolds, was its security. A grid of fine wires embedded in the walls, ceiling, floor, and single door completely enveloped the room with an electromagnetic field. The air itself, pushed in and pulled out of two large vents in the ceiling, went through filters charged with the same

electromagnetic field. No signal of any kind—from the timbre of the human voice to the most sophisticated electronic data pulses—penetrated this barrier. It was one of perhaps a half dozen rooms in the world absolutely impervious to eavesdropping. There were no phone lines, no permanent computers, no power outlets or electric wiring to transmit signals to the outside world—a method of eavesdropping known as "carrier current." The same type of power cells submarines used energized the room's lights and needed replacing only once a year. Though visitors navigated a battery of X-ray machines and ohm detectors, the guards manning these machines looked for recording devices, not bugs, which the electromagnetic field would render useless. Computers brought into the room had to be TEMPEST certified, meaning the transient electromagnetic pulses they emanated were too low to be detected by devices designed to capture them from the atmosphere and recreate the data they represented.

Reynolds turned from a disturbingly violent monochrome by H. R. Giger and hobbled to a rectory table where his laptop waited with more patience than he himself could manage. Reaching to touch the closed lid, he caught a slight tremble in his hand. He clamped it into a fist and watched it as he might a supposedly dead snake.

He heard the door open and looked up to see John Franklin stepping through the threshold, a guard leaning in behind him to pull the door closed again.

"Kendrick, what is it?" the president asked. In his late forties, square-jawed and blue-eyed, he was an aging golden boy whose stature and refinement reflected a life of privilege and spoils. The man's thick hair was artificially silvered because an image consultant had told him it would suggest experience and wisdom.

Kendrick listened for the click of the door's latch and the hydraulic swelling of its seal, which gave the room its Zero Acoustic Leakage rating. When he heard it, he said, "We have a problem. Not a little one."

One of the president's eyebrows rose slightly, a practiced maneuver.

Kendrick continued, "As you know, one of my projects has been looking for a man named Karl Litt."

The president sat on the sofa, crossed a leg over his knee. He searched his memory. "The scientist who disappeared . . ."

"Yes. Almost thirty years ago. But, Jack, there are some things about him I never told you." To the president's furrowed brow, Kendrick shrugged and added casually, "Plausible denial and all that."

That got his attention, Kendrick noticed. He pushed his fingers under the laptop, thought about his cane and tripping and the thing crashing to the floor, and said, "I'm sorry . . . Could you?"

The president hopped up and moved the computer to the coffee table. They both sat. Kendrick opened the laptop and pushed its power button.

"I'm not going to bore you with details you've probably heard a hundred times. The preliminaries are simple. Around the end of World War II, the U.S. recruited hundreds of German scientists. Many of them we brought in covertly, so other countries didn't know who we had or what we were doing. Almost every case proved invaluable to our technological advancement, to our ability to defend this country. Physicists like Wernher von Braun and Otto Hahn made the atomic energy program in Las Cruces. Hubertus Strughold went to the School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph, where he continued his human experiments in radiation warfare. Gerhard Schrader, who developed the nerve gas called tabun, went to the CIA's Chemical Biological Warfare program. They were everywhere, working on everything from jet propulsion to mind control techniques."

He glanced at the computer monitor. It was cycling up.

"I worked primarily with biologists. I met Karl Litt when his father sent him and thirty-four other gifted children to us instead of sending the scientists we were expecting. Long story short, my bio-weapons program was at least as successful as the other programs. Ours was the most secret. Nobody likes the idea of intentionally using germs to kill people. They're too unpredictable, too mutable. Nuclear power is limited. If every bomb in existence ignited, they'd destroy the world. But if one or ten or a hundred went off, it'd be awful, absolutely, but most of the population would survive.

"On the other hand, one very aggressive germ could go on forever, killing its host, moving to the next person and the next, exponentially, mutating to defeat our attempts to stop it. Where a bomb kills quickly, death by virus can be horrendously slow, unimaginably painful. Plus, as we disintegrated from the inside out, we'd get the added pleasure of watching our loved ones bleeding out around us."

The president's face registered his disgust. He rose, walked to a credenza, and lifted a portion of its top. He removed a decanter and two crystal glasses.

"Glenlivet?" he asked.

"Thank you." Kendrick looked across the room at a vividly rendered oil painting of David's triumph over Goliath, in which the boy warrior had not only decapitated the giant but proceeded to devour his oversized heart.

The president returned to the couch, arrayed the glasses on the table beside the laptop, and poured in two fingers. He thought a moment, then doubled the volume in each glass. He handed Kendrick one and sipped from the other.

Kendrick pulled in a mouthful, savored it, swallowed. Holding the glass just under his chin, he said, "At the end of World War II, the Soviet army discovered a biowarfare factory at Dyhernfurth, Germany. The idea that the Nazis were making such things infuriated the world even more than their conventional war machine did. In 1979, an outbreak of anthrax poisoning in Sverdlovsk, USSR, was attributed to an accident at a Soviet germ-warfare factory. Soviet citizens and people worldwide were outraged. The incident sowed the seeds that eventually strangled Communism." He sipped. "People don't like that stuff."

The president nodded. "That's the reason we've stopped pursuing it."

Kendrick smiled. "Not completely. As a nation, we can't let other countries advance beyond us in this field, if for no other purpose than to understand what's possible and develop defenses against it."

"The Geneva Protocol."'

Kendrick bowed his head in respect, surprised that Jack Franklin knew the citation. The Geneva Protocol of 1925, a treaty among the League of Nations, outlawed the offensive use of chemical and biological warfare agents but allowed their use to defend against attack. The treaty was still in effect.

He said, "In '69, Nixon proclaimed that the U.S. unilaterally renounced any use of biological and toxin weapons, and ordered the destruction of all of the country's biological warfare stockpiles. His administration then made quite a show of converting the biological warfare research facility at Fort Detrick to a cancer research laboratory. Other facilities suffered similar fates."

The president scowled, serious. "I am aware that several facilities survived and continued . . . experimenting, developing, whatever it is they do."

"In the spirit of the Geneva Protocol, the ultrasecret nature of our germ program allowed us to keep a few facilities up and running, the most clandestine labs."

The president nodded.

"What you don't know is that Karl Litt had a particular interest in developing race-specific diseases."

"Race-specific? You mean—"

"He wanted to target particular people groups and annihilate them."

The president started to speak, then chose instead to empty his glass into his mouth.

Kendrick said, "I think it was a remnant of his father's influence, his father's work. Josef Litt taught his son extraordinary things in the field of science. He may have instilled a distaste for Jews as well. If so, he hid it well. I never saw it overtly displayed." He shrugged. "Or it was something Karl wanted to do in honor of his father. He loved him very much, and over the years, I think he came to idolize him."

"You're talking about the Final Solution." The president shook his head. "Jews are not a race."

"Most Jews trace their lineage back to a group of Semitic, nomadic tribes dwelling in the eastern Mediterranean area before 1300 BC—the Hebrews. That gives them an ethnicity that population geneticists can identify. For years, biologists have possessed the technology to discern between ethnically defined populations. The same way we can identify certain physical traits commonly attributed to people of a particular heritage, biologists can examine DNA for ethnic traits. Litt focused his efforts on aligning pathogens with these ethnic markers."

Kendrick fell quiet a moment, remembering. "Litt told me once that he'd found a DNA characteristic unique to Ashkenazi Jews, those who settled in central and eastern Europe, and whose members include most American Jews. For some evolutionary reason, Ashkenazim are prone to ten inherited disorders—Tay-Sachs, ulcerative colitis, Gaucher's disease, I forget what else. Most of them are caused by recessive genes, meaning that symptoms appear only if two copies of the mutant gene are inherited, one from each parent. Litt was trying to mutate the second gene in people who had inherited only one. He abandoned the idea when he couldn't figure out how to accelerate the disease's effects once the mutation occurred. Victims simply took too long to succumb."

"That's insane," the president said quietly. "We supported this research?"

"Of course. Think of the applications of a substance that could instantly incapacitate an enemy while leaving our own men unaffected. Vietnam, Desert Storm—in both cases, our troops were in close combat with an army ethnically distinct from most Americans."

"So much for the melting pot."

"Some of our men would, no doubt, carry the ethnic markers of the enemy, and they would die. There's no way around that, at least for now. But the losses on our side would be insignificant compared to the losses incurred during conventional war."

Kendrick watched the president absorb this. He felt the presence of the room's vile artwork pressing in on him. The collection, which he'd always suspected was an attempt to muster courage and aggression in the men who would gather here to decide on issues of war, seemed merely repugnant in light of the current conversation.

"But . . . genocide?" the president said finally.

"Genocide would occur if the virus was used indiscriminately or maliciously, yes," Kendrick agreed. "But that would never be our intention."

"Is it Lift's intention?" Something occurred to him, and he squared his shoulders at Kendrick. "Are you saying Litt has perfected this . . . this Jew-killing virus? Kendrick, is he planning an attack on the Jews?"

Kendrick suppressed an urge to lower his head. Instead, he leaned forward. "It's much worse than that, Jack. Much worse."

seventy-seven

The laptop displayed a menu of the files Julia Matheson had sent him. Kendrick reached for the track pad. He said, "Watch these videos closely. The first one shows a field test of a virus—Ebola." A village with dirt roads appeared on the screen. As a black man stepped out from one of the shacks, Kendrick continued. "Ebola is very similar to the rabies virus. In fact, it was created in the Elk Mountain lab during Litt's tenure."

Jack Franklin nodded, then his brows came together. "Whoa, what?"

Kendrick tapped a key to make the video pause.

"Litt created Ebola?"

"All his fiddling with the rabies virus," Kendrick confirmed. "Trying to make it more virulent, more lethal, faster acting. Before we knew it, it wasn't rabies anymore. It was something new."

"But the outbreaks in . . . uh . . ."

"The first one occurred in Sudan in 1976, after Litt disappeared. Of course, it wasn't called Ebola when it was in our lab. He called it Zorn, or Zorn des Gottes—wrath of God. It wasn't until I saw a slide of Ebola, like an ampersand or G clef in music with a long tail, that I knew Karl was out there somewhere, perfecting his creation, field-testing it."

The president stared vacantly into a dark corner of the room. He had been jarred out of his presidential persona; it was as a member of the human race that he was considering what Karl had done. Kendrick hoped to keep him in that frame of mind, at least until his presentation's coup d'etat. He lifted the decanter and refilled their glasses. The president gazed down at the swirling amber, then brought the glass to his lips. He nodded at the laptop. Kendrick restarted the video.

As Jack Franklin watched the man on the screen succumb to Ebola, a thin film of perspiration broke out on the chief executive's upper lip and forehead. Several times he glanced over at Kendrick, who would nod grimly. The second video began right after the first ended.

Kendrick tilted to one side and fished the meerschaum pipe out of his right jacket pocket. Then he leaned the other way and pulled a small leather pouch out of the opposite pocket. He packed a wad of tobacco from the pouch into the top of God's head, taking great care in tucking straggly strands into the mound. He stuck the pipe between his teeth. He stashed the pouch, withdrew a lighter from the same pocket, and waved a two-inch flame over the bowl.

The video wound to its conclusion, and the menu screen took its place.

"The man at the end?"

The president nodded.

"Karl Litt."

"What happened to him?"

"He was exposed to an early strain of Zorn. It . . . changed him. Whatever it did, it must have been wearing away at his body all these years." He pulled on the pipe, then blew out a billow of smoke, which vanished into an air vent. "We identified the abandoned air base from the second video. And this . . ."

He selected a file. The screen filled with a map of the eastern seaboard, the Caribbean, and South America. He pointed at a red do: blinking over Chattanooga.

"This is a real-time recording of a satellite tracking operation. It's a plane that eventually lands on that airstrip."

"You know where he is."

"One more thing." He called up a map of the United States. A dozen or so areas glowed red. He zoomed in on one of them, which resolved itself into a distinct egg-shaped pattern with map markings in blue under it. "What does this look like?"

"Chicago."

"Look at the red superimposed over it."

The president studied it. The color was blood-red near its center and faded irregularly to a light pink. Freckles of white permeated the entire colored area. The president's eyes flared wider. "It's a . . . blast pattern."

"Except less round."

"Yes . . . yes . . ." He seemed to be having trouble breathing.

"It's a biochemical disbursement pattern," Kendrick said. "The dark red shows the vicinity of the initial release." He touched the mouthpiece of his pipe to the screen. "The shape is defined by estimating wind direction and speed, humidity, obstructions, vector weight, and so on."

The president nodded. Kendrick knew he'd seen such diagrams before, attached to defense budgets, showing hypothetical terrorism scenarios. But one thing was new.

"What are the white dots?"

"Targets," Kendrick answered simply. "Specific targets, specific addresses. Look here." Clicking on the keyboard, he brought up the list of names, addresses, and medical procedures. The data began scrolling like movie credits. Name after name flashed past. "Every white dot on the map represents one of these names. They all fall within twenty geographic areas of the United States."

"I don't understand," the president said, watching the names blur by. "Litt identified his victims by name? Why?"

"To prove he could." He jabbed the pipe between his lips and immediately spat out a short stream of smoke.

"So many . . ."

"Ten thousand. Twenty sites, five hundred per site."

The president jerked his head up as though he'd been slapped. A fiery redness rimmed his eyes. "All Jews?"

Kendrick shrugged. "Could be anyone. Jews, African-Americans. Asians, Caucasians. I guess you can say Litt's become less discriminating with age."

The president looked from Kendrick back to the flowing data on the screen. He reached out and, using a finger from each hand, jabbed key after key, apparently at random. "Stop this thing! Stop it—!"

Kendrick hit the spacebar. The names froze in place.

"This is obscene," the president said, angry, disgusted. He stood, stepped purposely for the door, stopped. He studied the glass in his hand, drained it. Without turning, he said, "Your assessment can't be right. A biological attack with a pathogen that affects everybody? White dots would cover the entire red pattern. Everyone would succumb. Imprecision and mass casualties are the hallmark of biochemical weapons. What's the point in identifying a thousand victims out of millions?"

"I said could be anyone, not everyone. Litt knows who his virus will kill. He chose them."

The president turned. "Chose them?"

Kendrick reclined back into the sofa, draping one arm across the seat back, the other raised to pull the pipe from his mouth. "Apparently Litt has designed a strain of the Ebola virus that seeks out specific individuals through their DNA. Once released into the atmosphere, the virus probably travels from host to host like a flu bug, but harmless. It checks the DNA of each host, comparing it to some set of instructions he has encoded within the virus. If it matches, it turns into full-blown Ebola; if it doesn't, it moves on to another host . . . until it finds a match."

Kendrick was calm, relaxed. He knew Jack Franklin. The man had not reached the pinnacle by following anyone's lead, by drinking anyone's Kool-Aid. He had a habit of responding differently from the people around him. If you wanted him to remain calm, you came at him in a tizzy; if you wanted him worked up—

Kendrick sighed. His eyes fluttered. He appeared ready to fall asleep. "Jack," he said, "Karl Litt has created a programmable virus. A fatal virus. No one has to get near the target. The assassin is the virus: invisible, silent, unstoppable. If you breathe, it will find you."

The president picked up the decanter. His arms lowered to hang at his sides, empty glass in one hand, whiskey in the other. He made no move to unite the two. He walked around the coffee table and dropped onto the sofa, his features drawn tight.

"Where'd the DNA come from?"

"You name it. We leave our DNA everywhere. If hospitals aren't drawing it out of our veins, we're leaving it in the combs we use, the clothes we wear, the envelopes we lick . . . Doesn't matter. Somehow, he got it. At least enough to slaughter ten thousand men, women, and children."

"Are these people he knows? Personally?"

"Not likely."

"Then why? Why do such a thing?"

"Because he can. Once the world believes he can select people at random to die so brutally, and that he's willing to do so with impunity, don't you think they will do anything to appease him? He can hold whole countries hostage. Demand anything: a hundred billion dollars, a million people for slave labor. Anything. Random, selective death. Anyone, anywhere. It's the power of God."

The president shook his head dismally. "Ten thousand American citizens?"

"For a start."

"God have mercy."

"Mmmm." He pulled once on the pipe, then turned it around to study the meerschaum rendition of Michelangelo's God, letting tendrils of smoke drift lazily out of his slightly parted lips. After a minute, he leaned over and carefully placed it on the table. "But we should not have such mercy."

"What do you mean?"

"I have one more thing to show you." He moved his finger over the laptop's track pad, grateful his hand had stopped shaking. The names scrolled.

The president moved to the edge of the sofa, leaning to watch. Kendrick caused the names to slow, then stop, then reverse. Then stopped again.

The president made a sharp noise, the way one would upon witnessing an accident. He grasped the laptop's monitor. The plastic made a popping noise as his knuckles burned white from the force of his grip. Kendrick could almost feel the air around him heat up.

Three names glowed on the screen, white letters on a black background. In format and content, they were similar to the other 9,997 names. But these and these alone would seal Litt's fate.

Kendrick suspected that the top one—John Thorogood Franklin of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC—by itself meant little to this man; he was strong enough to give his life if necessary. It was the next two that cinched it: the First Lady and their eleven-year-old son, a boy so loved and doted upon by his father that the media had— not so inaccurately—credited him with inspiring a familial inclination not seen in a chief executive for decades, and in so doing carrying the election for his dad.

The president glared at the screen for a long time. Except for the rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathed heavily, he might have been made of stone—frozen by a sight as hideous as Medusa and her serpentine locks. When he finally turned, gone were the fear and disgust that had marked his countenance since the first video began. The emotions that replaced them were unmistakable: righteous indignation and fierce determination.

Kendrick matched the expression with a scowl.

"Tell me," the president said in a voice of granite, "what do we do to stop this thing?"

seventy-eight

To distract her mind from the aches and stiffness of her body so sleep would come, Julia looked for familiar images in the intricate shadows on the ceiling. They were cast by the streetlamp shining through the lace curtains over their hotel room's window. Slowly her imagination turned the dappled pattern into figures: a grinning devil's face . . . a butcher's knife . . . a fat snake, poised to strike . . . flames . . . A slight flutter of the gossamer curtains gave these last two images eerie movement. She closed her eyes.

Their plane from Atlanta had landed at Sao Paulo's Guarulhos Airport shortly before midnight. By half past, they had taken a cab to one of the glitzy hotels on Paulista Avenue, walked a dozen blocks into seedier streets, and found a small hotel more suitable for vagrants than vacationers. She liked that the cabbie couldn't lead pursuers to them and that the hotel's night clerk was more interested in the tattered girlie magazine on the counter than in who was checking in.

She had calculated the odds of someone being able to track them down along their route to find Allen. It wouldn't be difficult. She had to assume Karl Litt had discovered the tracking device, which meant his people would be laying an ambush for them somewhere between Atlanta and their destination. It made more sense to trap them closer to Litt's headquarters, where his influence and familiarity presumably were greatest. Still, he might expect them to think that way and make his move farther from his home base, hoping to catch them off guard. She was determined not to let that happen. Even here, where it would be easy to let the sprawling Brazilian capital—with eleven hundred square miles and sixteen million inhabitants—lull her into a false sense of anonymity, she had to be on her toes.

Then there was Kendrick. He knew precisely where she and Stephen were heading, and if his purpose for wanting Vero's data was to conceal it instead of to find out what Litt was up to as he claimed, he would be after them as well. She'd risked everything to ask for his help. She didn't want to admit it to Stephen, but she figured they had a slingshot's chance in a gunfight of rescuing Allen without the firepower Kendrick could bring to the table. If he were one of the good guys, she wasn't sure what to expect. Would he threaten Litt into releasing Allen and use diplomatic channels to defeat him?

Litt wasn't a country, though, so what kind of pressure could the United States apply to him and his organization? She recalled a seminar at which the lecturer had pushed the notion that major corporations were the "countries" of the future. As technology made geographical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries obsolete, the seat of global power would shift from governments to boards of directors. Withholding innovations or using them to gain leverage over others would be the new way of demonstrating might.

By combining the nongeographical and apolitical aspects of a private organization and the militaristic might of a nation, Litt's plans might prove to be a sort of evolutionary bridge to a civilization where the Microsofts and ExxonMobils of the world dictated social policy and law.

She realized her mind had wandered and squeezed her eyelids tighter, until little plumes of red burst forth from the blackness. If beating the bush of hypothesis scared up anything, it was the fact that she knew almost nothing about Litt. Like a child making a monster out of a pile of laundry in the dark corner of her room, she had allowed the mystery of her enemy to grow into an omniscient, indestructible beast. Most likely he was some pathetic terrorist Kendrick Reynolds could squash with one strike from a team of commandos. It was this kind of action she had in mind when she sent Kendrick the chip data.

In a perfect world, she and Stephen would arrive at Litt's headquarters after Kendrick's men had done their thing. She and Stephen would find Allen in a jury-rigged medical tent getting a cursory physical or in some mobile command center being debriefed. They'd be commended for alerting the U.S. government about the terrorist danger; told to forget everything they knew about Litt, Ebola, and rumors of invasion in the interest of national security; and sent home in the belly of a C-130 to get on with their lives.

She opened her eyes, looking for the devil's head in the shadows above. Optimism was the last thing she needed right now. It would turn to disappointment when Kendrick's help turned out to be insufficient or nonexistent. The disappointment would turn to depression, which would make her indecisive and reactive. And that would get them all killed. Better to go into this on a foundation of reality. Rescuing Allen was going to be the toughest thing she'd ever attempted, and success was far from assured.

Determination surged into her chest at the challenge. In the dark, her lips formed a kind of steely smile.

They had entered the room exhausted and had fallen into their separate beds without bothering to undress or even visit the communal bathroom down the hall. A window air conditioner had been on, filling the room with a horrendous combination of humming, ticking, and tepid wind. After a minute, Stephen had grunted out of bed and switched it off. After that, the curtain had settled and the shadows had congealed into the spiderweb pattern she now perused.

Julia listened and heard Stephen's slow, deep breaths. She was considering waking him to discuss Litt's germ or their plan of attack or anything that might help her not feel so small and alone . . . when she fell asleep.

seventy-nine

Allen could not help himself. His mind kept returning to the video on Julia's computer of the man succumbing to Ebola, or what they had assumed was Ebola. The pain, the bleeding out, the convulsions. He remembered the way he had described it to Julia: "Internal organs start to decay as though you're already dead, but you're not. Your blood loses its ability to clot, then your endothelial cells, which form the lining of the blood vessels, fail to function, so blood leaks through. Soon it oozes from every orifice—even from your eyes, pores, and under your fingernails. Then you die."

He felt it in him, dissolving his tissues like acid.

He wished he were imagining it. Eighty percent of med school students experience some form of hypochondriasis—their detailed study of serious illnesses plants the seeds that blossom into psychosomatic symptoms. His roommate had suffered from it so badly, he'd dropped out. Allen wasn't prone to that; even if he were, he thought he'd recognize the difference between made-up pain and real, my-guts-are-disintegrating pain. What he felt was the latter.

The cot's crossbar still pushed into his ribs, but now he imagined his ribs bending softly under the pressure, his liver and kidneys and lungs oozing around it, dripping to the floor.

He opened his eyes. The bright fluorescents jabbed at them. The wall four inches from his nose was painted white. The roller had textured it with fine dimples. A faint brown smudge had remained after the last cleaning. He rolled over, folding the thin pillow to give his head more support.

Someone was standing in his room, leaning into the corner opposite the cot. An angel, he thought. White skin against the white walls. A white tunic draped over the white skin. But no, wouldn't an angel be beautiful? Perhaps not. This one was gaunt, skeletal, its head bald and bulbous. It wore sunglasses.

Allen raised his head, squinted at the figure. It was a man. The tunic was a lab coat, but the distressing angularity of his face and the paleness of his skin were just as Allen had first perceived. He'd seen the face before. The video: he was the man who had approached the camera at the end of the second clip, when Vero was filming the air base and laboratories. Allen propped himself up on an elbow.

The man smiled. "Good morning, Doctor," he said.

"What . . ." His throat was raw. He tasted blood. His voice was weak and gravelly. "What have you done to me?"

"I believe you know."

"I know . . ." He swallowed dryly. "You're Karl Litt."

The man pushed off the wall and stepped closer. His hands came together. With long fingernails he began scraping the back of one hand, then the other. "How do you recognize me?"

Didn't Litt know what was on Vero's chip? If not, Allen wasn't sure he wanted to tell him. He changed the subject.

"Is this . . . Ebola?"

"Did you determine that from your symptoms? I hope my specialty isn't also getting around."

"How? How was I infected?" They may have injected him when he was unconscious, but he didn't think so. If it was an airborne strain, then . . . "Why not you or the other guy . . . Gregor? Why not everyone here?"

"So you don't know it all." He looked around the room, then sat on the edge of the cot. "How much do you know about DNA?"

Allen raised his body into a sitting position. He felt his organs shifting and sloshing inside. He scooted back, slowly, painfully, until his shoulder blades were against the wall. "Not my field."

"As a physician, I'm sure you know more than an auto mechanic. But I'd hate for you to miss the punch line because the rudiments bogged you down. Oh . . ." He tugged a white handkerchief from his breast pocket and held it up to Allen.

Allen looked down. Blood had drizzled down his chest. He touched his fingers to his face. Lots of blood. He felt his cheeks, hoping it wasn't coming from his eyes.

"You have a nosebleed," Litt said. "It happens."

Allen took the handkerchief, wiped his hands and his face, and held it firmly to his nostrils.

"DNA," Litt said. "The complex molecule is a hereditary blueprint that defines a person's skin pigment, eye color and shape, hair color and texture, height, bone structure—every physical trait, including genetic diseases. Each DNA strand is made up of six billion repeating chemical units called nucleotides, consisting of one of four different kinds of chemicals called bases—A for adenine, C for cytosine, G for guanine, and T for thymine. So an individual's genome could be expressed GTTCGTCAAATTG . . . and so on for six billion letters. No two people share the exact same sequence. Twins are close, but still unique. Interestingly, nature—" He held a up a conciliatory hand. "Or God. I understand your brother is a priest."

"A pastor," Allen said flatly.

"Well, then . . . God put markers in generally the same spots on our DNA strands. These markers are the same in everybody. They're like road signs that tell us what the subsequent DNA codes are for— height, hair color, Huntington's disease, obesity. These markers simplify the process of finding sequences unique to specific individuals.

How many thugs are doing time because they left a bit of their DNA at a crime scene—blood, semen, skin, hair roots?"

"All right," Allen said. "DNA is unique and identifiable. That doesn't explain—"

"Now, now, Dr. Parker. This is fascinating stuff, if you hear me out." He cleared his throat. "I'm sure you're more versed in the ways of viruses. To refresh: A virus is designed to survive. Whatever it needs to replicate itself—to propagate the species, if you will—it will do. That may mean mutating to avoid a threat, such as an antibody, or to avoid competition from a stronger virus. That's why we have so many different ones. Herpes viruses seek out the cells of nerve tissue, the avian flu virus goes right for the alveoli cells, deep in the lungs. A virus is like a key looking for the cell with a matching lock. When it finds the right cell, it unlocks it and strolls on in, a thief with a key to the jewelry store. The virus tells the cell's DNA to stop what it's doing and focus on replicating the virus. So now a cell is destroyed, and the virus multiplies. In Ebola's case, the cells it commandeers happen to be the ones that hold together blood vessels and organs.

"Since we know that a virus has the ability to find what it needs, why not tell it what it needs? Gene splicing is a fairly simple matter these days. The technology exists, for instance, to take out the gene that codes for brown eyes and literally stick in the gene that codes for blue eyes. However, I did not change what the Ebola virus looks for— the lock that fits it. I simply added another lock. When Ebola finds a tissue cell it would normally unlock, it encounters a second lock and can't get in. That other lock is a specific individual's DNA, just enough of a sequence to differentiate that person from all but a few other people in the world. I splice that sequence into the section of the Ebola DNA that tells it what to look for, part of its glycoprotein gene. Now, it looks for only the endothelial cells of the person I told it to find. When both keys match, it takes over the cells, replicates, and essentially becomes full-blown Ebola. Or, more precisely, Ebola Kugel. Kugel means "bullet" in my native tongue. A bullet instead of a bomb." His lipless mouth bent upward.

Allen thought a moment. "You've got Ebola piggybacking on a common cold virus?"

Litt nodded. "Rhinovirus. It can move across the country in twenty-four hours. But Ebola is not so much hitching a ride as it is spliced into it. That way it replicates with the cold virus. I'm making it all sound very easy," he said with a wave of his hand, "but it's infinitely complicated, I assure you. If it weren't, someone else would have already done it." He slapped Allen's leg with his skeletal hand. "Now then. Why am I telling you all this?"

When Allen said nothing, he continued. "To convince you I know what I'm doing. None of this is an accident. I am in complete control. So believe what I say now." He bowed his head closer to Allen and whispered, "I have the cure."

Hope moved through Allen like adrenaline. He tried to suppress it, hold it down, but his heart thumped faster, his stomach tightened in anticipation.

"There is no cure for Ebola," he said.

Litt rolled his head, exasperated. "Have you heard a word I've said? Ebola also doesn't seek out specific individuals—but look at you. In fact, Ebola did not exist at all until I created it. Since I intend to use it against my enemies, would knowledge of a cure be something I shared?"

"So why tell me?"

"You have something I want. I'm negotiating."

"Vero's memory chip."

"And information: who knows what."

"Julia and I, we looked at the chip data. That's all."

"Your brother?"

Allen rolled the back of his head against the wall: no.

"See? You're lying. How can I trust you now?"

"What do you want?"

"Kendrick Reynolds. You know him?"

"The billionaire?"

"Have you spoken to him or his people? He would not have hidden behind anybody, not for something this precious to him. He would have enticed you with his fame. Did he contact you?"

Allen waited to answer, then said, "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Did he get the chip?"

Allen did not reply.

Litt's voice rose. "Does he know where I am?"

Allen held on to his deadpan expression. Did Kendrick know? It wasn't part of Vero's data, except the few scenes of the air base and the jungle beyond, and to Allen they'd seemed anonymous and ambiguous. If the tracking device was working, Julia and Stephen knew where he was, but did Kendrick?

Litt said, "I could care less what else he knows. If he's not already aware of Ebola Kugel, he will be soon. If he's not already aware of my plan to use it on American soil, he will be soon. All I need to know is: does he know where I am? That's all. Whatever your answer is, convince me it's true, and the Ebola virus eating your insides will go away."

"I don't know."

"Does the chip reveal my location?"

He did not reply.

Litt stood quickly. He brushed off his lab coat. "Think about it, Dr. Parker. Your pain can end whenever you want." He rapped on the window panel in the door.

"Litt," Allen said.

The sunglasses rotated toward him.

"If there's any chance this Kendrick guy has found out where you are, why don't you leave?"

"I need to know, Dr Parker. This is my home, my laboratory, everything to me. You understand?"

Allen remembered the list from Vero's data chip, and he finally understood its terrible implications. He wondered if all those people were already infected. Were they only now starting to feel not quite right, or did they feel the pain he did? Were they frightened, as he was? They were husbands, wives, and children. Brothers, sisters, parents. So many people affected. So much grief.

He said, "I saw your list of names." He tried to look hard, challenging. He suspected the only thing he conveyed was illness. "Why so many?"

The door rattled and opened. Litt gripped the edge. "Movies," he said.

"Movies?"

"They've desensitized us. One death, ten deaths are no longer interesting. Ten thousand deaths will get their attention."

"You've never studied Stalin?"

Litt raised his chin.

" 'When one person dies, it's a tragedy. When a million people die, it's a statistic.'"

"Dr. Parker, I don't think any parent will think of the death of his or her child as a statistic, do you?"

After a moment, he gave a satisfied nod and left.

eighty

The five-hundred-mile trip from Sao Paulo to Ponta

Pora took more than six hours, thanks to TAM Transportes Aereos's scheduled stops in the backwater towns of Mailia, Presenente Prudenti, and Dourados. At each tiny airport, the pilot and one flight attendant would disembark to share a soda and a few apparently hilarious jokes with the ground crew, while the copilot hurled rocks at mangy dogs. A handful of Brazilians, most looking tired or drunk, would shuffle off as their indistinguishable replacements shuffled on. At any given time, the thirty-passenger turboprop boasted a manifest of half that number.

The sky grew grayer with each stop, and each time the plane was in the air, the attendant would give a dramatic presentation describing the deluge assaulting the western edge of the state, where Ponta Pora lay. Upon leaving Dourados on the last leg of the trip, the weather outside the plane made her warnings superfluous. The plane pitched and rolled like a kite caught in a blustery wind. Two passengers became sick, filling the cabin with the pungent odor of illness. Julia and Stephen closed their eyes, gripped the cracked vinyl armrests and each other's free hand between them.

When they finally landed in Ponta Pora, the early afternoon sky was as dark as dusk. Sheets of heavy rain sliced down at an angle, seeming to undulate in the waning light. It beat so fiercely against the metal skin of the plane, Julia knew the engines had stopped only when she saw the propellers winding to a rest and the other passengers standing and gathering their belongings. As the cabin lights came on, Stephen's reflection appeared behind hers in the Plexiglas window.

"Wouldn't you know," she said to his reflection. Before leaving Atlanta they had transferred their belongings— a change of clothes for each, light jackets, toiletries, Julia's computer gear—into two JanSport daypacks, khaki for him, olive for her. They'd stuffed the remainder of the cash into the padded shoulder straps. That turned out to be an unnecessary caution; customs officials in Sao Paulo were beyond lax. They gave the packs nothing more than a heft, as if they were so attuned to contraband, they could recognize it by weight alone. Julia wished she'd brought her gun.

Stephen pulled the packs out of the small overhead compartments above their seats and started forward.

Julia reached for hers. "We're going to have to pull our own weight. Starting now."

"So don't let me be gentlemanly." He winked and relinquished his grip.

The attendant was having a hard time holding a grin as rain blew through the door, soaking her uniform and plastering her bangs to her forehead. She swung a hand toward the open door, hurrying them along. "Adeus. Por favor, va depressa."

"Adeus. Obrigado," Stephen answered. He caught Julia's bemused stare. "There was a language card in the seat-back pocket."

He ducked through the portal and started down a short flight of rolling metal stairs to the water-covered tarmac and was immediately drenched. Blinking rain out of his eyes, he turned back to see how Julia was faring. She skipped the last step, hopping past him, and darted for the airport door—a lighted rectangle in an otherwise black silhouette of a building.

Inside, she bent at the waist and briskly fanned her fingers through her hair. Big plumes of droplets burst from her head. She said, "Can you believe this?"

"Can we use it in our favor?" He was appraising the small airport, giving each person a few seconds of scrutiny.

Julia slapped him on the back. "Now you're thinking."

He handed her a jacket from his pack, slipping an arm into his own. In the high heat of mid-May Atlanta, they hadn't remembered that it was late fall here. Subtropical though it was, the temperature was in the brisk fifties. The rain made it feel even cooler.

They pushed through big glass doors and found themselves protected from the rain by a deep portico. At least ten cars were parked at the curb, none of them cabs. Right in front of them, an old Ford station wagon began chirping something melodious from a modified horn. A man behind the wheel leaned toward the passenger-side window and waved them over. He had long black hair and cocoa skin, and appeared more Indian than Latin.

"Para onde quer ir?"

Stephen shook his head. "I'm sorry . . ."

"Oh, ha-ha! Where to? You need hotel? I know good hotel."

"No," Julia said behind him. "We'd like to eat. Do you know a decent restaurant?"

"O restaurante? Sure, sure! Come inside."

Stephen pulled a ten-dollar bill from his breast pocket. He showed the driver. "American?"

"Sure, sure!"

They climbed into the backseat, which was like a carcass, its skin stripped and picked away, and sat on wiry stuffing. Stephen shifted and settled into the least uncomfortable position, with a coiled spring pushing up into his thigh.

Julia asked, "Can you get us to Pedro Juan Caballero? Is it a problem getting across the border?"

"PJC. No problem. Open borders. No one cares." He ground the transmission into gear and swerved away from the curb without checking for oncoming traffic.

Thinking of the tracking device's position outside of town, Stephen leaned forward and asked, "Do you know, is there another town or an estate or something about ten miles northwest?"

Julia touched his arm. When he looked, she gently shook her head: Don't talk about it.

"Northwest?" the driver said.

"Never mind. It's okay."

"Nothing that way," the driver said. "Just forest. Trees."

"We'll do our own recon," Julia whispered.

"I figured knowing what we're going into couldn't hurt."

"We don't know who we can trust."

Stephen caught the cabbie scowling in the rearview mirror. South Americans were known for their exceedingly good manners toward strangers. He'd heard that they'd rather suffer an indignity than offend with a retort. But then, they were only human. He supposed the cabbie didn't appreciate his passengers whispering secrets.

"I'm sure there are plenty of good restaurants around here," Stephen said to the driver, trying to make amends by pulling the man into a conversation.

"Yes," he replied, curt.

"Almost there," Julia said and squeezed Stephen's hand.

He looked out at the dark, wet day. "I only pray we're not too late."

The downpour robbed the Siamese-twin towns of Ponta Pora, Brazil, and Pedro Juan Caballero, Paraguay, of any personality they may have possessed. Everything appeared flat and gray. Lights burned in store windows. Empty chairs and benches squatted on the sidewalks. The storefronts were all narrow. The signs above them appeared amateurishly hand-lettered and in several languages, rarely English— except for a profusion of Coca-Cola and Marlboro signs. In the three blocks they watched, the wagon passed four, maybe five drugstores, their busy windows marked with an odd assortment of symbols: the familiar pestle and mortar, the caduceus, large capsules and tablets, test tubes, even skulls and crossbones.

A steady vibration coming up through the seat and a particular sound told Julia and Stephen what their eyes could not detect: the streets were cobblestone. When tires are on wet pavement, they hiss, like the air is coming out of the world. These tires made a gentle, rhythmic sha-sha-sha—the beat of a snare drum.

"Are we in Paraguay?" Julia asked.

"Oh, yes."

"How far back was the border?"

"Minutes. Just minutes. The big street, Avenida Internaconal. Did you see it?" He motioned behind them.

Stephen remembered a street that was slightly wider than the others, a few blocks back.

"That was border. Nothing. I told you."

"I can't see the difference," Julia said.

"The signs. Guarani and Spanish here, mostly Portuguese there. When no rain, PJC has lots more vendors in the street, no restrictions like Pora."

"So really it's one big town, shared by two countries."

"Eh, not so big."

They wound through the deserted streets for another few minutes, then the driver pulled over. "Good food here."

"Looks like a bar," Stephen said.

Julia opened the door. "It'll do."

Stephen handed the driver the ten and slid out with the daypacks.

The station wagon coasted away, rain making it fuzzy and ethereal. As it began rounding a corner, a gust of wind rippled the rain, and the car vanished.

Stephen smiled at Julia's wet-dog look. "We hoofing it somewhere else?" he asked.

"You got it."

"First hotel?"

"First restaurant, deli, or bar, not counting this one. I really am starving." She took the pack from him and hoisted a strap over her shoulder.

He looked one way, then the other. Both directions looked bleak, abandoned. He lowered his head against the driving rain and started walking.

eighty-one

The call came in on what Gregor thought of as his "informants' line." It was the number he'd given out to airport personnel, cabbies, hoteliers, and restaurateurs in Pedro Juan Caballero and Ponta Pora to report on people asking about Karl, the compound, or missing persons. Most of the calls had been false alarms, the result of overactive imaginations and underfunded bank accounts. He paid a few of these anyway, simply to encourage watchful eyes and loose lips.

This call was different. He realized it as soon as he heard the description of the man and woman. Steven Parker and Julia Matheson. Here. They'd somehow followed Allen Parker. No doubt it was the Matheson woman's doing. FBI. CDC. Whatever. Probably a homing device on the plane.

He thought a moment. "Give me your number." He entered it into his BlackBerry. The government-run phone system was so undependable, it seemed everybody in the region had a mobile phone. Maybe no pot to pee in, but definitely a flip phone. He told the cabbie to keep an eye on the visitors and promised him a big bonus.

He hurried down one of the complex's dim, dank-smelling corridors, passed his face in front of a thermal reader, and entered the laboratory wing. He stood for a moment, letting his eyes acclimate to the area's bright fluorescents. Karl would have his head. What was Gregor thinking, inviting Atropos to the compound? It had exposed them to discovery by people they didn't want visiting. The arrival of Matheson and the brother made that clear. If Karl shot him on the spot, he'd deserve it.

Shoot? Karl wouldn't shoot him; he'd extract his revenge in a more poetic, nastier way. It didn't matter that they'd known each other since childhood. Gregor had jeopardized Karl's life's work. And for what? To meet Atropos. One of the great hit men of the world. Correction—several of the great hit men of the world.

Despite the dire situation, Gregor smiled. What a revelation. To be one of a handful of people who knew Atropos's secret. No wonder he was so prolific, so omniscient. Atropos was not one man but four.

Three now, Gregor thought. The three brothers had asked to be taken to the compound's morgue. Before Gregor had left, he witnessed the opening of the body bag the first Atropos had brought. Inside was another Atropos, grotesquely wounded.

Their grief had been great and wretched.

He understood now how Matheson and the Parker brothers had hurt them . . . him. They referred to themselves in the singular, as though, like their name and appearance, they shared one mind, one personality, one soul. If giving them the same name and treating them as one had been their father's way of making the world think one person was as powerful as four, he had succeeded; but in so doing, he had also made his sons completely dependent on one another, like one person split into four.

They wanted revenge. They wanted to see Allen Parker suffer and beg for death, a torture Karl's germ provided in spades.

And now the other two responsible for Atropos's loss were within striking distance.

Why did Karl even have to know they had arrived? That was a can of worms he didn't want to open. And Atropos would gladly remedy this problem.

They were back out at the planes, waiting for Allen to manifest the virus, waiting to torment him as he died. Gregor would tell them he had arranged for the arrival of their brother's other two killers. His gift to them.

He showed his face to the black tile next to the door, which opened. As he stepped though, heading for the stairs that would take him topside, he marveled at his skill at turning complications into advantages.

Karl's microscopic bugs may be the future of assassination, he thought. But I've got today's model right here, right now. Times three.

eighty-two

Julia and Stephen stepped out of Aka Haruja-—the Pig's Eye Tavern, the owner/waiter/barkeep had told them. Their bellies were full, and a mug of homemade beer had taken the edge off Julia's nerves. From their table near the front window, they had watched the rain abate and then ramp up again as they paid the check.

The streets were still empty. The sky was still black, a swirling cauldron of low clouds.

Julia nudged him. She was looking at a station wagon on a side street a block away. It was parked, its headlamps and cabin dark.

"Is that the cab?" Stephen asked.

While they watched, the tailpipe burped out a puff of exhaust. The downpour muffled the engine noise. The headlights came on, dim cones of light catching the drops passing through them. The vehicle rolled forward and turned onto their street, heading for them.

Stephen angled his arm across Julia, gently pushing her back an inch.

"It is," she said.

He looked back at the tavern's door. He could grab Julia and be through it in three seconds.

The station wagon approached slowly. Its right front tire dropped into a pothole, splashing out muddy water. Stephen sensed the headlamps illuminating his legs, then his chest, then his face, growing brighter. He took a step back, forcing Julia to do the same.

"Let's see what he wants," she said.

"How could this be good?"

"We're not going to get anywhere if we don't take chances."

"Didn't you say we can't trust anyone?"

"He already knows our business. Maybe he's thought about it and wants to sell us some information."

Stephen expected the car to make a roaring lunge at them, but it simply coasted alongside and stopped. He could see the cabbie's smile as he leaned to roll down the window.

"Hey!" the cabbie said. "Other place food no good?" Acting natural.

Julia leaned around Stephen. "What do you want?" she asked.

"Get in. Rain no good."

"Come on," Stephen said and took a step toward the tavern.

"I have news," the cabbie called. "Good news for you."

"Like what?" Julia said.

The driver's smile faltered. "My mind came back. You asked about place in the northwest, yes? There is something."

"What?"

"Get in." He read their expressions. "Is okay. Look, I have nothing."

Stephen leaned closer. On the passenger side of the bench seat were loose papers, a tattered magazine, and a mobile phone, a brick-sized thing from a decade ago.

Julia stepped past him and tugged on his shirt. She opened the back door and climbed in. Stephen followed. The heater was blasting out scalding air; it smelled like burning plastic.

The car started moving.

"We'll talk here," Stephen said.

"This street no good. Bad . . . uh . . . element . . . kids." He turned a corner.

Stephen looked at Julia. She lowered her head, whispered, "If this turns bad, jump out your side. Don't worry about me."

He nodded. "Are you buying any of this?"

"If nothing else, it's a lead, it's something."

The car made another turn. All the streets looked alike: empty, dark, and wet.

Julia poked him in the thigh. "Listen. If something happens to me, go to the American Consulate. It's probably in Asuncion."

"Nothing's going to—"

The car braked hard, throwing the two of them into the seat in front of them. Rain hit Stephen's face. The driver's door stood open. The driver was gone, three quick, splashing footsteps, then nothing.

Stephen jerked his door handle up. Julia grabbed his arm. Blood was smeared on her upper lip, leaking out her nose. She was peering over the front seat, through the windshield.

He looked. There was nothing out there but a disappearing red-dirt road, rust-colored puddles, millions of little stalagmites of water pinging upward, wavering sheets of heavy, dark rain . . .

And a man.

Walking toward them in the center of the street. Just a silhouette. Rising and falling with each step. Gone now, lost among the cascading beads. There! Closer! Broad shoulders. Tall. Wearing a . . . cape? No, a long coat, an oilskin slicker. It took a few seconds to realize the figure had stopped moving; the rain maintained the illusion of movement. Then it slacked.

"The Warrior," Stephen said. The wound in his side seemed to throb, as though confirming the killer's presence. He became aware of the dome light, making their faces visible to the man outside. Atropos waited at the far edge of the headlights, appearing blurry and grainy, a 1970s eight-millimeter version of himself.

"He knows where Allen is," Stephen said.

"We're not ready," she said. "He'll kill us. We need to do this differently."

"Like how?"

"We need to be the ones surprising him, not the other way around."

"Too late."

"Why's he just standing there?"

"He's grinning," Stephen said. He felt his muscles tighten with anger.

Atropos swung his arm up. A red light glimmered, then his hand appeared to explode in white light. Windshield glass shattered over them. Then again. Stephen turned to cover Julia, but she was already falling out of her open door. He shouldered open his own door and tumbled out into the mud. He rolled to the rear and fell into Julia, crouched at the bumper. The back window ruptured; glass pellets washed over them.

He looked at her hard. "You run," he said. "I'll distract him." He started to rise. She lunged at him, encircling his neck with her arm. Her face, mud peeling off it with each strike of raindrop, was all he could see.

"You're not doing that!" she said. "You didn't come this far to die in the mud. I can't save Allen alone. I need you."

"You need me right now," he said. "Let me get you out of here."

"Not like this. We both go or neither of us does."

He saw in her eyes she was serious.

She uncoiled her arm and took his hands. She moved them to the bumper. "Hold on," she said. Then she rolled away, back around the side of the station wagon.

"Wait—!"

He peered through the windowless back. Through cantaloupe-sized holes in the windshield, he watched Atropos approach, slowly, with confidence. He saw Julia's hand come up by the steering wheel and grab the shifter. She yanked it down. The engine gunned, and the station wagon fishtailed and shot forward.

The tires slung mud into Stephen's face, blinding him. He pinched his eyes closed, held his breath, and tightened his grip on the bumper. The road played out under him, jostling him over ruts and potholes. A hundred tiny fists beat his chest, stomach, legs. Their speed seemed tremendous, and the ride went on and on. The hidden edge of the bumper cut into his fingers. Mud pushed under his grip, slick as soap. He turned his hands to stone, but he couldn't hold on much longer.

The wagon crashed into something. His body lifted and his head cracked against the tailgate. He released the bumper. His face dropped into a puddle. He used it to splash the mud out of his eyes, his nose, his mouth. He rolled onto his back, raised his head, and looked. They had traveled only about three blocks.

How could that be?

Atropos was back there, not as far away as Stephen would have thought . . . or wished. Red mud coated the killer's right side, as though he had hit the road to avoid the station wagon. The rain was washing him clean again, as it was Stephen.

Julia appeared at his side, a fresh gash in her forehead.

"I'm all right," she said before he could ask. "Come on."

She tugged on him, and they both rose. They passed the station wagon, which had struck a large wooden cart. Crates of oranges had tumbled onto the hood and road.

At the first street, they turned right. Stephen looked back, slipped in the mud, and fell hard. Julia pulled him up. Stephen wiped his eyes and peered around.

They were on a street mixed with storefronts and small houses that appeared to be cobbled together from old signs and corrugated metal. The rain and false dusk cut visibility to roughly two blocks; any direction could lead to a dead end or to the relative safety of a crowded indoor market—there was no way of knowing.

"This way," she said, heading up the street.

Stephen took the lead. They sloshed through rust-red torrents, blinking at the pelting rain. The water was cold; Stephen's toes went from frigid to sore to numb. At each cross street, they scanned for signs of people or police or shelter. Stephen continually veered to one side of the street, then the other, rattling door handles, rapping at doors. Pedro Juan Caballero could have been a ghost town.

At an intersection, a cutting wind hurled beads of water at them with the force of a shotgun blast. They stepped out of the crosscurrent, and Julia stopped so fast her feet slipped out from under her. She clung to Stephen's arm, managing to stay up only after planting one knee in the mud.

Atropos was coming toward them. Somehow he had overtaken them, or they had gotten turned around in the storm. Julia kept her eyes on the killer as she regained her footing. The wind had caught the man's long coat, causing the sides to flap behind him like leathery wings. She saw a flicker of red dancing at his side: his pistol like an extension of his arm.

Lightning burst across the sky, illuminating a million raindrops as if they were tiny mirrors. It blinded Stephen for a sheer moment. In that time, Atropos halved the distance between them. Clear, now, was the look of grim determination on his face. His right arm rose stiffly, pivoting at the shoulder. The laser drew a glittering arc toward them.

"Move!" Julia yelled. She shoved her weight into Stephen. The two splashed down in a stream of rushing water at a point in the street where a curb would have been, had these back roads possessed them.

He didn't hear the spit of the silenced gun, but a nearby window shattered like a melodic counterpoint to the rain's ceaseless pounding.

"Move! Move!" she screamed. They tumbled over each other, gaining their feet. He pulled her up and pushed her forward, back the way they'd come. She stumbled again, splashing down in the mud. He leaped over her, his momentum making a sudden stop impossible. He turned and was blinded by Atropos's red laser. He snapped his head away and felt the hot-piercing impact of a bullet.

eighty-three

The red dot of Atropos's gun flickered through the beads of falling water and touched Stephen's face like the finger of fate. He flew back, crashing through the door of a shop, its glass pane bursting into slivers, for a second becoming indistinguishable from the rain.

"Stephen!" A drenched rope of hair fell into her face. She swatted at it, flipping it away. "Stephen!"

She rose from the mud and swung around toward Atropos. He stood dark and solid in the center of the road, fifty feet away. The gun was at his side again, and he was simply watching. Slowly, watching him, but anxious for Stephen, she stepped to the shop door. The Warrior made no advance, no move intended to stop her. He seemed to be communicating his understanding of the situation: she and Stephen were his to kill at his leisure; nothing they did could prevent him from acquiring his trophies.

Stephen was lying inside the store, his feet protruding over the bottom wood slat of the door. His head was thrown back so only his hairy chin and neck were visible beyond his chest. Did she really want to see his face, the damage a 9mm could do to it? But if he were alive, could she deny him the chance to behold a friendly face before dying?

Then his chest heaved, and he raised his head. His eyes found her and his lips tried to form a smile, but settled on a grimace.

"Stephen?" She felt disoriented, dreamy.

"I think he shot me." He crossed his right arm over his chest and gripped his shoulder. She saw where the jacket was torn and soaked in blood.

She stepped through the broken door and crouched at his side. "I thought . . ." She smiled and he took it in; the healing touch of an angel—or a shot of morphine—could not have effected such a positive change to his expression. He grinned, reminding her of when they met, only a few days ago; she'd felt an instant kinship with him and had hoped she wasn't being naive. Her chest tightened as she realized now he was one of the few genuine good guys—as Goody had been. Her heart ached to see him hurt.

She stuck her finger in the bullet hole in his jacket and felt for the wound. He winced.

"High on the shoulder," she said. "Not too bad."

His eyes widened. "Where is he?"

She looked out through the destroyed door. "He's just standing there, watching. I think he's toying with us."

At that moment Atropos's rain-blurred figure took a step toward them, then another.

"Stephen, you have to get up." She got her arms under him and helped him up. Atropos was forty feet away and closing in fast. They stumbled around displays of pottery and handmade ceramic picture frames, heading for the back of the store. They plowed through a closed door into a living room, where a family huddled together on a threadbare sofa. The mother, a teenage daughter, and two school-age boys were making an admirable attempt to disappear into the father's embrace. They all looked healthy and loving. And utterly terrified, Julia thought.

"I'm sorry," she said. She pointed toward another door that was ajar and seemed to lead to more rooms. "Go in there, please!"

"They don't understand," Stephen said.

"Go! Go!" she yelled, waving the way. The family dislodged themselves and started to comply. Julia shot to a third door, this one metal and heavily bolted. She opened it. "Alley," she announced. They heard the crunch of glass from the store. "Come on."

The passage was narrow and dark. Slate clouds swirled in the strip of sky overhead. The rain pelted the side of one of the buildings that formed the alley and cascaded down; a fine mist descended upon them. They sprinted left. She heard Stephen's splashing footfalls and labored breathing behind her—sounds the tight alley magnified. They passed another alleyway that transected their own. Ahead, the rain at the end of the alleyway appeared to bow inward, taking the shape of a man before he actually materialized just inside the alley.

It was Atropos.

She stopped cold. Stephen huffed behind her. "I . . . don't . . . understand . . ." he managed between inhalations. "Could he . . . have . . . come around . . . that fast?"

She thought of the crunching glass they'd heard in the store. No way. "Go back," she said. The figure was moving toward them. Spinning, they dashed toward the opposite end.

Ahead of them, Atropos stepped through the door into the alley. His head snapped around to take them in.

They stopped cold. They looked from one warrior to the other. Physically, they were identical in every way. They even converged on Julia and Stephen with the same measured gait. Each held a pistol in his right hand, a little red dot dancing beneath it, reflecting off the wet surface.

"They won't shoot," she told Stephen. "They're in each other's crossfire." She inched toward the Atropos that was farthest from them, the one who had followed them through the store. She pulled Stephen along by the hand.

"When they get close enough, they will," he said.

"That's why we're going to run down this other alley. You see it?"

"Yep."

"To the left."

"Yep."

"Now!"

They bolted into the cross-alley, crashing over a garbage can. Food wrappers and bits of trash clung to their legs; the odor of rot wafted over them. Julia's stomach, already knotted by fear, contracted at this new revulsion. She knew she could vomit and run at the same time if she had to. But in the next second, she'd forgotten about corporeal grievances—her aching muscles, her cold and waterlogged flesh, nausea—and simply ran. She listened for a sound that would signal the warriors' arrival at the head of the alley. Would they try to get closer? Or would they just aim and shoot, a certain bull's-eye in this straight-as-a-shooting-range passageway? Would the spit of a silenced round be the last thing she ever heard?

They came to the end of the alley and whipped around the corner, out of the path of any bullets sailing their way. They pressed against a stuccoed wall, panting.

"We gotta keep going," she said. Then a movement caught her eye, A block away and across the street, a stranger emerged from an alley. He was wearing a leather jacket, appearing casual with one hand in a pocket. He had stolen Indiana Jones's hat and had it cocked forward, obscuring his eyes. Rain poured off of it like a backyard water feature. He motioned to them, beckoning, then stepped out of sight.

Stephen looked at Julia.

"I don't know," she said.

A loud sound came from the alley next to them, a knocked-over-trash-can sound. That decided it for her. She ran toward where the man had stood. They curved around the corner and saw him at another intersection of alleyways. He was a black man and almost invisible against the darkness. Again he beckoned to them. He disappeared into the adjoining alley.

When they followed, they found that the alley disappeared into darkness. Behind them, footsteps echoed against the buildings. They plunged into the darkness. As a wall of brick materialized at the end of the alley, a metal door swung open. Julia crashed into it; Stephen crashed into her. Bodies rushed out of the black opening, enveloping her in unyielding, viselike arms.

She kicked out, and a pair of hands seized her foot, wrenching her leg. She was pulled into the darkness. Stephen came behind her, grunting and thrashing. The door shut, and the arms hurled her to a dirt floor she could not see. She felt Stephen land beside her. A click, and light pierced her pupils. Blinded, she heard more clicks, metal sliding on metal, mechanisms locking into place. She knew these sounds. Shielding her eyes, she looked around—

Into the black barrels of a dozen guns.

eighty-four

Julia blinked. A face presented itself over the rifle poised directly in front of her. Crevices exaggerated the contours of the man's mouth and cheeks, the permanent twin furrows between his eyes. A spiderweb of delicate lines fanned out from his eyes, which were red and moist and slightly protuberant. Folds of flesh gave him little jowls that, coupled with an expansive mouth that God surely intended for profound utterances, made him look wise. It was a face at once friendly and sad.

It was the man who had beckoned to them.

The rifle came down—only this one—and the man pressed an index finger to his lips. "Shhhhhhh," he whispered, soft and long, as a mother to a baby. He took one step backward and leaned an ear to the metal door. Gently he laid the fingertips of his empty hand against the door, as though feeling for vibrations.

No one else in the room moved. They stood in a circle around Julia and Stephen, leveling an arsenal of pistols, rifles, and shotguns at them. Water dripped from their clothes. The man at the door cocked his head and raised his rifle like a shaman's staff, a call for silence. Then she heard them: footsteps approaching the door, the scuff of a sole against pavement. The sound moved past without pausing.

Someone behind Julia clicked his tongue, preparing to speak. The man at the door raised the rifle higher, shook his head. The sound outside the door returned, this time stopping directly outside. Silence. There was no noise for so long, Julia wondered if the person outside had moved off undetected. There was an almost imperceptible click. Her eyes fell to the doorknob, which was turning slowly. After the slightest rotation, it stopped. The person outside—certainly one of the Warriors—rattled the handle, shook the door.

"Get down," Julia hissed, trying for both discretion and urgency.

Then it happened: the assailants outside fired into the door. The bullets made convex dents in the door's metal skin but did not penetrate it. Two . . . three . . . four. The man at the door moved to the side, gesturing for the others to do the same. The handle jerked violently, then again, as bullets hit its outside counterpart.

Julia noticed that a heavy bar had been braced horizontally across the door; their safety was not dependent on the handle's integrity. The handle fell away, leaving a three-inch hole straight through to the gray alley. A shadow moved over it, then an eye appeared, rolling to take in the men, locking on Julia.

A rifle cracked behind her, loud. The bullet pinged three inches from the eye, which pulled away. A sound-suppressed barrel slipped into the opening. It spat blindly, hitting the wall behind Julia.

Men yelped and bolted toward an interior exit.

The black man by the door slammed the butt of his rifle against the barrel, which spat another bullet—this one kicking up a chuck of dirt a foot from Julia's knee. She felt hands under her arms, and she rose off the ground at rocket speed. She swung through the air and landed on her feet behind the crush of men leaving the room. She looked back. Stephen's expression was firm, implacable. He pushed her forward.

The man at the door kept striking at the barrel until it retreated. At the edge of the hole, the door's metal skin exploded inward.

The Warriors outside were shooting through without exposing their barrels.

She made it into the next room. The men crowded the back wall, pointing their rifles at the doorway. The black man ran in and slammed the door. He nodded, and someone hefted open a trapdoor in the floor.

The black man walked to the edge. He took in Julia and Stephen. "Come," he said.

Julia hesitated.

His expression softened. "It's not a dungeon. It's an underground passage. To a safer place. It's only a matter of time before those blokes get in." Tinged British, his voice was deep and smooth.

As if to appease her, or to indicate he was out of there, with or without her, he stepped into the hole and descended until he was gone. She peered down. A flashlight flicked on, revealing the man's face at the bottom of steep stairs. She glanced at Stephen and dropped her foot through.

The air below was moist and cool and redolent with an earthy scent that reminded Julia of clean skin. Without a word, the man turned and walked into a tunnel, carved through red dirt and clay. She followed. As they moved deeper, the sounds of the other men's boots on the steps, the creaking of leather holsters and jackets, the rattle of their weapons became ambient white noise, like the dull roar of a conch. When the man in front of her spoke again, he was a decibel shy of yelling.

"These passageways were constructed during General Stroessner's dictatorship. He had a passion for torture. Paraguay has been free of him for three decades now, but evil still haunts this little town, so the tunnels remain. The trapdoor we used has a metal core and a good lock on the underside, but even if your mates with the guns get in, they probably won't find us."

"Probably?" Julia said.

"Best we can do on short notice."

They came to a room from which a half dozen tunnels branched off. The man lit a lantern that hung from a hook in the ceiling and waited for the other men to stream in. He spoke in a foreign tongue and someone responded.

"Everyone's here," he said. "Name's Sebastian Tate." He flashed a set of big teeth and held out his hand.

"Julia," she said. "This is Stephen."

His eyes settled on Stephen's shoulder. "You're hurt." He called to someone behind them. An old man with a mangy long beard stepped forward, pushing a huge revolver into the front of his pants. He gingerly peeled Stephen's jacket and shirt off the shoulder and prodded the wound with long, bony fingers. He waved his hand at it, as if disappointed. "Pire erida," he said.

"Flesh wound," Tate interpreted. "Are you in pain?"

"I'll live."

To the old man, Tate said, "Poha."

The man rummaged in a leather pouch tied around his waist, produced three white pills, and handed them to Stephen.

"Aspirin," Tate said. He turned to Julia. "You look like you can use some too."

She touched the gash in her forehead. "Yeah, thanks." She dry-swallowed the pills and asked, "How did you know to help us?"

"Those freaky triplets were shooting at you."

"Triplets? We only saw two. I think."

"There were three, as identical as Oreos. One of the men saw them come into town from Angra Road. Only one place those geepas could have come from. And if that place wants you dead, you must be worth saving."

"What place is that?"

"The old air base. Now let's get going." He strode into one of the tunnels. As they walked, he explained that he'd come to Paraguay as a journalist for the London Times, covering the country's escalating organized crime problem. What he found, however, was infinitely more sensational—the regular disappearance of the citizens of Ponta Pora and Pedro Juan Caballero. Men, women, and children, simply

gone. One per week, on average. His editors were not interested, so he took a year-long sabbatical to investigate, try to write a book. He "came under the enchantment of a beguiling inamorata," was the way he put it—and the year stretched into two, then three. Despite the area's paltry cost of living—the typical Paraguayan pulled down less than most Americans spend on cable television—his savings eventually eroded, and he took a job as the northeastern correspondent for ABC Color, Paraguay's national daily newspaper.

He stopped and turned around, his hand gripping the side of a staircase leading up to a trapdoor, a thin bead of light seeping along its edges. Muted voices filtered through as well. And laughter, which made Julia smile thinly.

"We're here," Tate said.

eighty-five

Julia and Stephen followed Sebastian Tate up from

the tunnel into what amounted to its polar opposite: a cavernous warehouse, brightly lit by hanging metal lamps and warmed by a clanking industrial furnace. Boxes and crates lined the walls, leaving a ballroom-sized area in the middle. Like the room at the other end of the tunnel, the floor here was hard-packed earth. A fine pelt of grass had sprouted around the edges of the open area. A flea market's assortment of tattered sofas, disemboweled easy chairs, automobile seats, and lawn chairs with missing webbing appropriated half of this open area, along with a hodgepodge of shelves, tables, and dressers. The spirited conversation Julia had heard from below came from roughly two dozen people, mostly women.

One of them, a pretty woman in her thirties with flowing black hair, walked quickly toward them. "Mba'eicha?" she asked.

"Opavave al pelo pa," Tate answered.

She collided with him and wrapped her arm around his neck. He groaned as she squeezed him. Then they kissed, long and passionately. She broke away and studied Julia and Stephen.

Tate spoke to her, and she returned to a small group of women.

"My Rosa," he said, flashing two rows of big teeth.

Rosa returned with two other women, each trying to talk louder than the others until they were very nearly screaming.

Tate calmed them down, addressing each in turn. He grinned at Julia and Stephen. "Rosa wants to wash your clothes. She says she's never seen two dirtier people."

A young woman stepped closer. "Jahu?"

Tate nodded. "Ernestina will prepare baths for you in the back rooms. And Fatima will get you drinks and soo ha chipa—meat and bread."

"How nice," Julia said, nodding. "I feel like I should understand them. That's not Spanish?"

"Guarani. Mostly an aboriginal tongue, with a measure of Spanish tossed in." He pointed at Stephen's side. "You've got another injury."

Through the soaked and muddy clothes seeped a basketball-sized circle of blood.

Stephen looked under his arm at the splotch. "Must have torn out the stitches."

"Roberto will see to that."

He hailed the old man who'd helped earlier. Roberto grunted off the floor, where he was removing his boots, and began a shuffling journey toward them.

Tate said, "He was trained as a vet, but he's pretty good with humans too."

Julia nudged Stephen. "I guess I get a bath first, then."

"Enjoy."

Ernestina took her hand and led her toward a door. Before stepping though, Julia looked back. Tate was kneeling by two men, showing them how to field-strip an automatic pistol.

Fifty minutes later, Stephen was sitting on a sofa, Julia

beside him in one of the formerly overstuffed chairs. Both were wrapped in heavy Indian quilts, self-consciously waiting for Rosa to return with their clothes. Whatever the temporary discomfort of sitting almost nude among strangers, Julia thought, being warm and clean was worth it. She'd had to drain the tub of its murky red water after a quick submersion and refill it to soak the rest of the grime off her body. Even so, she was still dislodging granules of cinnabar sand whenever she ran her fingertips over her scalp.

Fatima stepped up to the low table before them, balancing three large bowls in her arms. As she set each on the table, she announced its contents. "Yva." She lowered a bowl of whole fruit: apples, bananas, mangos, and mostly oranges. "Asodos." Steaming slices of charbroiled meat.

A hearty aroma washed past Julia, and despite the meal she'd eaten at the Pig's Eye Tavern, she felt hungry again. By Stephen's rapt attention to the bowl, she guessed he was feeling the same.

"Chipa." Loaves of brioche-type bread, so hot the girl's beaming face wavered behind its steam. Fatima straightened, planted her hands on her hips, and smiled, pleased with herself.

"Gracia," Julia said.

Ernestina had given her a cursory lesson in Guarani. So far, Julia's repertoire consisted of four words: yes, no, thanks, and bathroom. What more did anyone need?

Fatima nodded at Julia. She swung her head around, tossing her hair over one shoulder. She flashed emerald eyes at Stephen and gave him a smile measurably bigger and brighter than the one Julia had received. "Okaru."

Stephen stared dumbly at her. Julia couldn't tell if it was the word or her stunning beauty, so flirtatiously displayed, that left him speechless.

"Okaru," she repeated and pretended to pick something out of one of the bowls with all five fingers and put it into her mouth. "Okaru."

"Eat!" Stephen said, snapping out of his daze. "Yes, thank you . . . gracia."

Fatima pursed her lips into a coy smile and sauntered off.

No chef in Paris or New York could have made a dish better tasting than the asodos and chipa. The two ate leisurely and watched their hosts move about the big room, discussing points, studying maps, cleaning and re-cleaning guns. A few wandered over, nodded solemn greetings, grabbed oranges, and returned to their business. Julia became aware of an almost palpable sense of apprehension hanging in the air, a musty odor of fear.

A shifting shadow caught her eye, and she spotted a man sitting high on a stack of crates, peering out one of the windows that lined the top of the twenty-foot-high walls. In the shadows, only his dark shape was visible against the dull-iron luminance of the world that lay beyond the glass, but she could clearly make out his rifle. She was scanning for other lookouts when Fatima came by with two mugs made from bull horns.

"Terere," she called the drink. They thanked her and she left, swishing her simple cotton dress to and fro as she did.

Julia smelled the concoction and sipped. She made a face and set the mug on the table.

"You better like that," Tate warned, plopping down on the sofa next to Stephen. "Everybody drinks that stuff here. Everybody, all the time." "It's bitter," she complained.

"You get used to it." He surveyed the remaining food on the table, peeled off a strip of bread, and pushed it into his mouth. Chewing slowly, he leveled his sad, perceptive eyes at her. He was not smiling. "Wanna tell me why you're here and why Nana-ykua doesn't want you to be?"

"Nana . . . ?"

"Nana-ykua. It means 'Demon of the pit.' The townsfolk believe that place is evil, and for good reason. Long as most can remember, people would go out that way and never come back. Or they would—with tales of the guards shooting at them. What are you here for?"

Stephen answered. "They kidnapped my brother."

Tate nodded. "That's what they do. That bloke over there, the one with the scar on his face? That's Emilio. His papa disappeared ten years ago, right off the streets here in PJC. Emilio went to the local tahachi, the police. Said they'd look into it, but they didn't. One of our men, who used to be on the force, said a drive out to the gates of the air base was good for a 100,000-guarani banknote—a couple days' wages. Emilio even went to Asuncion, to the federales. Nothing ever came of it. He got together with others who'd lost someone, a wife, a child. They'd go out and take potshots at the guards, the buildings, try to sabotage the vehicles heading out there. Eventually Nana-ykua installed heavier security, some really nasty stuff, and that ended that. Emilio and his mates started patrolling the streets at night. They interrupted a couple kidnappings. Beat them good. After a few of those, the disappearances stopped. Then they began in Cerro Cora, about fifteen klicks west. We helped set up patrols there too. Then in Antonio Joao. Kept pushing the kidnappings farther and farther away. Where'd they get your brother?"

"Chattanooga."

"In the States?" Tate's eyes flashed wide. "Whoa."

"Not the same kind of kidnapping," Julia said. "But they have him, and we want him back."

Rosa came over and sat on Tate's lap. She spoke to him.

Tate nodded at Stephen. "Your clothes are ready. They're in the back room, where the baths are."

Stephen left, and Rosa began running her fingers over Tate's head and neck.

Julia watched for a moment, then said, "You've made this your home."

"Rosa's my home." He closed his eyes, feeling her gentle massage. Then he looked around the room. "These are wonderful people. Kind-hearted. Generous. They don't deserve what's been happening to them. Husbands, wives, kids—just gone. Stolen. At first I wanted to expose the problem the only way I knew how, by writing about it. Then I found Rosa, and all these mates found me. Now I want to help in more tangible ways."

"That's admirable, fighting their cause."

"It's my cause now too." He smiled up at his lady. "Rosa won't go back to England with me. She won't leave her family. So this is my home, as long as Rosa will have me."

Rosa kissed the top of his head, then his ear.

"Looks like the feeling's mutual," Julia said. She paused a moment. "You're handy with guns."

"SAS, in a previous life."

She cocked an eyebrow at him, seeing more in his weathered face and firm body than she had before. SAS was considered the first and still the best special forces unit in the world.

"This ragtag bunch," he continued, "farmers and ranchers mostly, needed my kind of help."

"To protect themselves from the kidnappings?" A former SAS member seemed like overkill. Start taking people where she came from, and a good two-by-four would put an end to that quick enough.

"They have bigger plans, if they can ever—"

He looked up and nodded appreciatively.

Stephen was heading toward them, dressed in clean clothes and looking thoroughly pleased by the fact. As he walked past a cluster of men, the man Tate had identified as Emilio stepped up to him. The two spoke words and continued heading toward the oasis of furniture set to one side of the expansive room.

Stephen plopped down and held up something for Julia to see. It was a big revolver.

"He wants you to inspect it," explained Tate. "It was his father's."

"Yes, my papa's. A nice gun," confirmed Emilio, standing by the couch and grinning down at Stephen.

Stephen hefted the weapon and sighted down the barrel.

"Very nice," he said. He handed it back to Emilio, who lofted it proudly, then shoved it into his waistband.

"Well, look at you," Julia said, eyeing Stephen's fresh appearance.

Stephen tugged at his collar and brushed the front of his clean and apparently ironed shirt. "Yes, yes," he said. "I am myself again." He plucked some meat out of the bowl and folded it into his mouth.

Emilio pulled a lawn chair closer and sat.

"Thank you for your hospitality," she told him.

"You feel better?"

"Much, almost human. I'll feel even better with my clothes on."

Emilio blushed, the blood giving his dark skin a cinnamon hue. "Soon, I think." He spoke to Rosa, who glanced at Julia and laughed good-naturedly. She slid off Tate's lap and walked toward the back rooms.

"I'm fine, really." Julia pulled the quilt tighter and tucked the edges under her legs. She turned to Tate. "You said they have bigger plans that could use your SAS background. What?"

"To crush Nana-ykua!" Emilio said. He yanked the pistol out of his waistband and pumped it in the air. "Aikoteve peikoteve che rehe, Nana-ykua!"

Cheers and hoots sprang from the men around the room.

"Well . . ." Tate said, patting the air to calm Emilio and urge him to put away his weapon. "Someday."

"Someday? No someday!" Emilio said. He smiled at Julia. "We get them now, no?"

Stephen was nodding. Julia didn't know how to respond. Was Emilio offering this group's help? Could they really go in, guns blazing, and get Allen?

Emilio said, "Bad people out there. Who is gone? Who they take?"

"My brother."

"Oh, eme'ena." He stood and yelled at the others, an obvious rallying cry.

The other men raised their weapons over their heads. Some had to dash across the room to grab a pistol or rifle. They chanted the same phrase over and over. To Julia it sounded like the non-words of an Ennio Morricone soundtrack, or maybe "We can fight! We can fight!"

Emilio slammed his revolver down on the wood table. He raised Julia's horn of terere. "We go tomorrow," he said, showing her every tooth in his mouth. "No more! No more Nana-ykua!" Tonight we rejoice and drink." He hoisted the horn. The brown liquid splashed out, soaking his face. He laughed and the other men joined in.

Julia grinned at Stephen. She asked, "You ready?"

"No more Nana-ykua!" he said, punching his fist in the air.

eighty-six

Julia's eyes snapped open. She gasped for air, but nothing came. A palm was clasped tightly over her mouth. Her hand immediately slid under the jacket she was using as a pillow; then she remembered she did not have a pistol.

Tate's face loomed out of the darkness. He held a finger to his lips and removed his hand. He turned from her and pressed his hand over Stephen's mouth. He woke much more gracefully than she had: only his eyelids moved, sliding open like those of a restless corpse in a movie. She checked her watch. 3:40.

Tate jerked his head toward the door of the little room they occupied and started picking his way over the sleeping bodies of the men around them. Julia and Stephen followed him with their backpacks. They stepped out of the smaller room into the cavernous central room, which was nearly as dark; fat bars of moonlight fell through the high windows and streaked the floor. Tate pressed himself against the wall and looked up at those windows

The sentries, Julia thought, but could not see them.

He drifted quietly and quickly to another door and slipped through. They followed him into another room where a flickering flame made the walls appear to fall away and leap forward. Hanging on hooks, coats, jackets, and sweaters danced in the stuttering light like nervous ghosts.

"Listen," Tate whispered, so close to their faces she could smell the bitter terere drink on his breath. The candlelight illuminated the high spots of his face and filled the rest with inky shadows. The effect was beyond eerie and intensified his very presence. "I'll take you to the air base, if you still want to go. Right now, just us."

"But the men," Julia said. "They said—"

"They're not going to go. I tried to tell you last night. They're not ready, and they know it. Something will come up. The weather. A family member will get sick."

"But they were so . . . excited."

"They get like that from time to time. It's what's in their hearts. They really do want to go and bring Nana-ykua down. They pray that maybe all the kidnapped people are still there, alive. But they know better. They want revenge, and they want to end the disappearances and the fear."

His scowl appeared severe in the light.

"You got them going this time," he said, "you and those weird triplets after you. In the end, they'll remember they have families that depend on them, and they'll remember how fortified that air base is. They'll remember that they are farmers and ranchers, not soldiers. They'll go back to patrolling the streets, defending their people one threat at a time. In six months or a year, they'll get worked up again. Maybe then or the time after that, they'll go through with it, God help them. But not today."

They were quiet. Then Stephen asked, "Why are you helping us?"

"Because you don't stand a chance on your own." He moved to the wall of jackets and selected two, tossing them to Julia and Stephen. He was already wearing his own leather jacket, dark and crinkled like skin sloughed from his face. He gripped the door handle, then turned back as though he'd forgotten something crucial. "You'll probably die anyway," he said, his hushed voice velvety in the still air, "but this

way I'll be able to live with myself." He opened the door and stepped into the chilly night.

Just outside Pedro Juan Caballero, the dirt road became an obstacle course of deep furrows and gaping pits—all filled with opaque water and banked with slippery mud. They were traveling in the oddest vehicle Julia had ever seen: it was a flatbed pickup of sorts, with a boxy front end, high cab, and bumpers that jutted out at least three feet from both ends; they looked like guardrails welded to horizontal posts. The seat was a wooden bench, the dash an unsanded wood plank. Strangest of all was the section of school lockers mounted to the bed behind the cab and rising above the roofline like a submarine's conning tower. The thing alternately roared with unnecessary gusto and then wheezed, ticking and coughing, on the verge of death. She couldn't decide if the Mercedes-Benz symbol on the ravaged grill was authentic or a joke.

At first, she was happy to discover the heater worked. Then, when her toes started feeling like boiling sausages and perspiration streaked her face, Tate informed them that the heater was stuck—and lowering the fan speed would cause it to overheat and break for good. He cracked the window to counter the heat, which chilled her face without helping her suffering feet one bit.

They sat in grim silence, staring through two recently cleaned spots in the bug-spattered windshield at the road's torturous topography. Tate flicked on the radio, and a stream of staticky polka music emitted from a small speaker. Barely into what Tate described as a circuitous thirty-mile, five-hour trip—the last eight miles on foot—her rear end already hurt. On top of the constant jostling on the hard bench, she suspected that a toothpick-sized splinter had embedded itself down there, but she decided the discomfort was better than the indignity of removing it. Every time Tate slammed the gearshift into the lower section of its H-shaped pattern, she had to push her knees to the right, into Stephen's thighs, to avoid getting them cracked by its long metal rod.

After nearly two hours, Tate said, "Now then."

She jumped a bit at his voice and was certain Stephen's head had hit the metal roof.

"The compound is under an old military airstrip in the heart of Paraguay's only jungle region."

"Under?" She'd never considered a subterranean complex.

He explained the slow process of discovering this fact through interviews with suppliers and Paraguayan officials looking for graft, and through personal reconnaissance.

"And this isn't even a jungle, really. Not in the way most people think of jungle—with a high triple canopy that keeps the sunlight out, heavy vines, fronds as thick as blankets. It's not quite that dense, despite being part of the rain forest that spreads down from the Amazon Basin. Think of very congestive woods and you'll get the idea."

"So we can reach the air base through the woods?" Stephen asked.

"I didn't say that. Nana-ykua has provided for himself what nature did not: an impenetrable fortress. Radiating out from the compound are tree-mounted cameras, microphones, microwave motion detectors, electric fences, booby traps, mines. We learned the hard way about these devices."

"Then what are we doing?" Julia asked. She looked at Stephen. Was he pale or was it just the way the moonlight washed over him? She squeezed his hand reassuringly.

Tate smiled. Leaning toward them, he mock-whispered, "I found a secret."

She waited for him to elaborate.

"An old mine. The Spaniards who settled this land didn't find the gold and silver they had in Central America or the northern part of South America, but they sure did look for it. The thinnest vein got them digging, tunneling until the thing petered out." He glanced at them, his smile broadening. "There's one that runs right into the compound."

"The opening is accessible?"

"It starts way outside, so far outside that it goes under almost all of Litt's perimeter security."

She nodded. Could the tide really be turning in their favor finally? "And Litt's people don't know about it?"

"Used to, I think," Tate answered. "They tapped into it when they moved in, far as I can tell. They put in a big steel door, an emergency exit, I think. Looks like they forgot about it. When I stumbled onto the mine, the entrance was completely overgrown with foliage; there were cobwebs as thick as ropes, spiderwebs, bats, other critters."

"They must have it secured."

Tate smiled, drawing infinite pleasure from the well of their surprise. "I found all their devices and reworked them so I could trot on by without anyone the wiser. I've been running reconnaissance through there for over a year. Can't get into the underground complex. I picked the lock on the metal door, but it only opens into a long hall with a door on the other side that has an electronic lock I can't pick. I was able to sneak into the topside part of the compound and observe their comings and goings. They're so confident about the perimeter security, they pretty much ignore inside the compound. On the surface, at least." He paused. "And I know where the stairs are."

"So why haven't you used them?"

"I have no idea what to expect down below. I've never wanted to use force, because that would alert them to the security breach. Then they'd look for it until they rediscover the mine—"

"And plug it up," Stephen finished.

"I want to keep that ace up my sleeve. For when we're ready."

"Well, Stephen and I are ready." In her excitement Julia had absently reached beneath her to hunt for that obstinate splinter. She caught Stephen watching her with an amused smirk. "The seat bit me," she said.

Tate laughed, deep and loud. "Woman, I've been driving this thing so long, half my butt is wood!"

That got them laughing, and for a moment they forgot about their destination and the perils that awaited them.

eighty-seven

The sky had lightened to a Russian blue by the time

Tate steered the truck off the road and into the jungle. He plowed through fifteen feet of dense foliage, killed the engine, and hopped out. Stephen and Julia joined him at the back. Stephen stretched and massaged his muscles. Julia considered rubbing the ache out of her backside but settled on rotating her upper torso, hands on her hips. She breathed in the tropical air, felt the humidity against her skin, listened to the drips, the rustling, the infinite stillness of the jungle around her. Turning her thoughts to the daunting task that lay ahead, her stomach tightened; but the rest of her felt energized, excited to be moving toward the contest, happy to be

doing

something.

Tate gave them the once-over and shook his head. "You're not ready for a trek through the jungle," he announced and hoisted himself onto the flatbed. He clicked through the combination on one of the lockers, leaning close to see in the half-light, and yanked up the handle. When he turned around, his arms were laden with an assortment of items. "Hop up here and sit down."

When they did, he jumped to the ground, losing a few items on impact. He put his goods next to them, pulled out four large Ziploc bags, and handed two to each of them. "Pull these over your socks." When they had replaced their sneakers, he lifted Julia's left foot and began mummifying it with duct tape.

"Is this necessary?" she asked impatiently.

"Depends." He continued rolling the tape around her foot, the adhesive screeching rhythmically with each pull like a bird in pain. "Are you okay with spiders and snakes?"

"Snakes?" she said weakly.

"Lots of them. False water cobras, pit vipers, more varieties of coral snakes than in any other part of the world—all very deadly. If you see something slithering, kill it or run." He ripped the tape free from its roll. He rummaged through his pile, extracted a pair of women's gardening gloves, and handed them to her. He passed two large work gloves to Stephen. "Two rights, I'm afraid."

"Whatever works," Stephen said as he began what turned out to be a long process of squeezing his monstrous hands into the gloves.

Tate used tape to connect Julia's gloves to the sleeves of the heavy leather jacket he'd given her, then examined the neck opening, hitching the zipper all the way up. "That oughta do it."

He handed her a filthy and frayed wool cap, which she held delicately away from her. "Are we trying to scare Litt to death?" she asked.

He jumped onto the flatbed and stepped to the open locker. The sky had lightened enough to reveal its contents of shovels, rakes, and hoes. These he removed, dumping them noisily on the flatbed. He hinged open a false back and pulled out two pistols.

"Sig Sauer or Beretta?" he asked, squatting by Julia.

"What, no Springfields?" she joked. She was relieved to have something more substantial than a hoe with which to face Atropos and Litt.

Tate was all business. "I think you'll like the Sig," he said, lifting one of the guns.

"I went through the Academy with one," she responded, taking it. Its heft felt good in her hand. She removed the magazine, saw that it had the maximum number of rounds—thirteen—and slammed it back into the bottom of the grip. She pulled back on the slide, ejecting a bullet.

"I always keep one chambered," Tate said.

She nodded, retrieved the round, and flicked the magazine release with her thumb.

Tate watched her, the folds of his face molded into an incredulous expression.

"What?" she said.

"You can do that with bulky gloves on."

"Funny thing. Our training at the Centers for Disease Control including handling weapons in a biosuit—you know, those floppv astronaut-looking outfits? Never thought I'd be chasing germs in a South American jungle, wearing duct tape and gardening gloves, but it doesn't feel that different from my training."

"Did you think you'd ever need that kind of training, that bio-cop stuff?"

She thought about it. "In this day and age? Sure. But I pictured going into a skyscraper in Manhattan with a SWAT team and a platoon of biologists."

"And after I left the service, I thought the scariest thing I'd be doing was covering Parliament for the Times. Have a Charles Douglas-Home Prize on the mantle by now." He held the Beretta out to Stephen.

"No thanks."

Tate shoved the pistol into his waistband at the small of his back and began replacing the gardening tools he'd taken from the locker He opened the one next to it and removed a safari hat, black police-issue gloves, and a web utility belt, already rigged with a holstered pistol, a knife, a flashlight, a coil of rope, and a machete. He tugged a knapsack out of the locker, checked its contents, then slung it over his shoulder. He shoved a fat cigar in his mouth, already lighting it with a match cupped in his other hand. He snorted out blue smoke, tossed the spent match over his shoulder, and spoke around the cigar: "Ready?"

Julia and Stephen looked at each other.

Tate leaped to the ground. He approached what appeared to be a solid wall of vines, branches, and leaves at the front of the truck. In one fluid motion he drew the machete and cleaved a long vertical line in the wall. He pushed himself into this opening, as though through a curtain, and disappeared.

eighty-eight

Descending the stairs to the underground complex, Karl Litt called to Gregor on his handheld. When he reached the anteroom at the bottom, his security chief finally answered.

"Where are you?" Litt demanded. He put his face in front of the thermal reader, and the heavy door serving the primary corridor unlocked.

"Inspecting the perimeter. What's up?"

"I had an interesting conversation with Atropos . . . one of them." Litt paused, leaning against a curving wall of rusted, corrugated metal. Ahead, the corridor came to a T: left to the laboratories and infirmary, right to the living quarters.

Gregor said nothing.

Litt said, "Parker's brother and Matheson, Gregor? Did you forget to tell me?"

After a moment, Gregor said, "Atropos was on it."

"That's not the point. How did they track Parker here? Who else knows?" He closed his eyes.

Gregor's incompetence had reached the pinnacle. Sixty years ago, when Gregor had failed to show an aptitude for science, Litt had convinced Kendrick to find another use for him. Gregor went away, then returned with military and security training. After Litt left Elk Mountain, he sent for Gregor, who'd come without hesitation. Even then, Litt had known Gregor's lack of intellectual acuity was not limited to science but was systemic to the man himself. Still, he was diligent and loyal; more important, he was a friend. Over the years he'd demonstrated a talent for keeping the compound secure and secret— not an easy task considering its constant need for supplies and human subjects, coupled with Kendrick's determination to find Litt.

Now, however, Gregor's efficiency had evaporated: the polygraph had failed to detect Despesorio Vero's intentions; Gregor's insistence on hiring Atropos had not resulted in Despesorio's quick capture or recovery of the evidence he had smuggled out of the compound; and now he'd allowed outsiders to find them. More than once lately, Litt had wondered if these slips were not so accidental. Perhaps, like Despesorio, Gregor had become disenchanted with life on the compound. Could Gregor be concerned that his role there would diminish with Ebola Kugel's successful launch? He should know Litt would always need security, as long as it was good security.

"Karl, I've got the situation under control."

"You do?" He shouldered himself off the wall and continued walking. "Do you know how they found us? Do you know who helped them? Who they've talk to about it? I don't think you have the situation under control! Find them. Find out what they know. I shouldn't have to tell you that." He waited for a response.

Gregor said nothing.

Litt dropped his handheld into a hip pocket and walked away, his anger growing with each strike of his heel on the dirty concrete of the corridors. By the time he opened Allen Parker's cell, he was ready to pummel the prisoner's face into a bloody mess. He stopped short.

Parker lay face up on his cot, his mouth agape, thick saliva oozing out. His head rolled back and forth. His hands crawled like nervous spiders over his torso, clenching at his chest, then his stomach, side, returning to his chest. A cardiac monitor had been wheeled in. It plotted the beats of Parker's lethargic heart.

"Bradycardia," a voice said.

Litt jumped. In his fury, he had not noticed the mousy Dr. Rankin standing on the other side of the room.

"His heart's beating too slowly," Rankin said. He was wearing a green surgical gown, tied at the waist, and a matching cap, which had hiked up high on his head and roosted there like a mascot. As he spoke, he poked a syringe through a medicine ampoule's rubber stopper and withdrew a careful measure of clear liquid. He turned to a wheeled cart of instruments, set down the bottle, and held up the syringe to expunge it of air. "He's developed dyspnea. BP's down to 70/50. This atropine should take care of—"

Litt rammed a bony shoulder into Rankin's back. The doctor tumbled into the cart, spilling its contents to the floor. He hit his head on the wall and sat down hard.

"Are you mad?" Rankin said, more shocked than angry.

"In fact, Doctor," Litt said, leaning over Allen, one knee on the cot, "I am extremely mad." He leaned over Allen. "How did they know? Who told you to come? Where is the—"

"Do you have film on him?" Speaking to Dr. Rankin now. "Where is his film?"

Rising, rubbing his head, the physician pointed at a large envelope clipped to the cart.

Litt removed a thin sheaf of X-rays and held the first one up to the light. He dropped it and examined the next, then the next.

"There," he said, pointing. It was a small, crisp oval of bright white among cloudy gray shapes. "In his upper intestines." He dropped the X-rays. "Ten-to-one it's a tracking device." He bent and picked up a scalpel off the floor.

He grabbed a handful of Allen's jumpsuit at the navel and slashed at it. He pushed his fingers into the tear and ripped open the material, exposing Allen's stomach. He positioned the scalpel just below the belly button.

Hands gripped his shoulders and yanked him back. He spun to face Rankin.

"The man is almost dead. Be . . . civil, please!"

Litt's wrath surged over the physician like ink. "Do not interrupt me! Ever!" He lashed out.

Rankin stood before him, vibrating like a struck piano chord, eyes wide behind prescription glasses that reflected back the alien orbs of Litt's own black lenses. His mouth froze in the form of a perfect O.

Warmth over his skin caused Litt to peer down. The hand holding the scalpel was half hidden by a fold in the doctor's surgical gown. Blood formed a scarlet glove up to his wrist and poured from the bottom of his hand to the tiled floor, the first great globule landing as he watched. He had plunged the scalpel under the man's sternum, upward to his heart.

A squeal, nearly inaudible at first, issued from the little circle of mouth, rising in volume and pitch as Litt studied a magnified tear quivering on one of the doctor's bottom lids. He pushed the scalpel deeper. The tear fell. The squeal stopped. Litt released his grip, and the body crumpled to the floor. He stepped back, holding his dripping hand away from his side. His eyes rose to the body on the cot. Taking Rankin's life had drained much of the emotional frenzy out of him. What did it matter if the tracking device remained where it was? Parker's brother and the woman had already followed it here. The damage was done.

He stepped into the hall. No one was in sight. He reentered the room and straddled the corpse, placing his feet wide to avoid the blood. He bent at the hips and knees; an observer would have thought Litt intended to kiss the dead man. Instead, he paused inches from the face. He cocked his sunglasses up to examine the now waxen visage.

The right side of Rankin's glasses had skewed upward in the fall, leaving his right eye naked. It was dark brown and nearly lashless, and Litt marveled at its glazed quality, as if dulled by the dirty thumbprint of Death. Then he realized that the glazed eyes of the dead—endowed by poets with wisdom and otherworldly sorrow—were caused by dryness, nothing more. The sparkle they lacked was moisture, not the essence of life.

Disappointed, Litt let his glasses fall back in place. He dipped his fingers into the bloody pool. He rose and moved to Allen's side. Locking his vision on the gaping face like a pickpocket watching his mark for the slightest sign of suspicion, he smeared the blood over Allen's right hand. He covered the front and back and had to return to the pool twice to complete the task. He used the limp hand like a brush to smudge the khaki prison jumpsuit. He also ran the hand down the side of Allen's face.

Allen's one useful eye fluttered open. He sucked in a wheezing breath.

"Litt," he said. "The cure."

"Who sent you? Does Kendrick know?"

"Cure . . ."

"It's here, my friend. Do you know what it is?"

Litt scanned Allen's face: sweaty skin, ash gray; quivering lips; bloody gums. The eye, though—conscious and aware. He'd seen it before, as if the mind were the last to give in to the disease.

"Me," he said. "My blood. Years ago, I was exposed to an early strain. I survived." He raised his head. "My family did not, but I did and started producing antibodies. Isn't that a cruel joke? My body created the cure for the disease that killed my wife and children. I've developed the antidote, but I've shared it with no one. And never will."

He stood. Allen's eyelid dropped.

At the door, Litt looked back. In a fit of anger or insanity, the prisoner had murdered his caregiver.

Litt shook his head and closed the door.

eighty-nine

The trek through Paraguay's northeastern jungle

was as excruciating as Tate had warned. Branches ripped at their clothes, snagged their hair. Thorns jabbed at them and elephant grass whipped at their faces. The flickering shafts and dapples of sunlight piercing the foliage only added to the confusing array of leaves and darkness, solids and space. Tate led them in one direction, then another, sometimes hacking through layers of vegetation, sometimes following the serpentine meanders of small-game trails. They waded through narrow streams—Julia constantly anticipating the first sharp pinch of a piranha.

"Don't fret over one or two bites," Tate had said. "It's when you feel a quick half dozen that you have to get out fast."

At the next crossing, a nibble on her calf scared an audible gasp out of her, and she scrambled onto the bank a dozen feet ahead of the others. When she discovered that she had been attacked by a piece of duct tape that had come loose, she rubbed it and said nothing.

Tate dropped down beside her, taking the healthy deep breaths of an athlete in training. He checked his watch and said, "Three-minute break." He removed the knapsack from his back and withdrew a canteen, which he handed to Julia. She took a long pull of tepid water. quenching a thirst she had only vaguely acknowledged. Tate rummaged in the knapsack, then offered leathery strips of beef jerky, brightly wrapped energy bars, and the requisite oranges.

Julia squinted up at an impossibly yellow sun dancing on the tree-tops. For a moment, it was possible to believe she was back in Georgia, out in the Chattahoochee wilderness, her feet caressed by the waters of Holcomb Creek. Jodi would be getting on Goody for talking business, while he waved her off good-naturedly and slapped her behind. The boys would be laughing, splashing in the creek, asking, "When are we gonna eat?" The sun warmed her face, splashing red flowers against her closed eyelids. A thousand fragrances mixed on the breeze and—

"Time's up!" Tate bellowed like a football coach.

Julia gazed up at him, dazed and disappointed. He unsheathed the machete, exhaled loudly, and marched forward, leaving a smoldering cigar in the cup of a peeled orange.

After an hour, the treacheries of jungle travel became tedious, and her mind reached out to their destination: What will we find there? What opposition? What breaks? She wondered what Kendrick Reynolds was doing. Had he sent in a commando team? Was he, even now, negotiating for Litt's surrender? Two days had passed since she left the hard drive for him. He should have begun the operation to stop Litt immediately.

She slid down a muddy bank into yet another stream, following Tate and dimly aware of Stephen's presence behind her. She was moving mechanically now, using some primal surface consciousness to travel efficiently, grabbing a root to stabilize herself for a trick descent or mimicking Tate's jog around a nasty thicket.

She didn't realize Tate had stopped until she walked into him. He had his forefinger pressed to his lips. She held up her palm to Stephen. Around them, trees rose like scaffoldings, holding their heavy leaves sixty feet above the ground. Smaller trees and bushes, their spindly branches and dappled leaves exploding wildly from unseen stalks. crowded like children around their parents' legs. The three humans stood in shadowy darkness, but for a single shaft of intense light that defied the canopy's protection to splash the ground at their feet.

"We're here," Tate whispered.

Julia rotated her head, saw nothing that would distinguish this spot from any other place in the jungle. As it was, she felt disoriented by the jungle's lack of a horizon or of landmarks that remained visible for longer than a few minutes. It didn't help that she had lost track of time, sensing the distance they had hiked only through her fatigued muscles.

"We will be going under much of the compound's perimeter security," Tate reminded them, waving his hand vaguely in the air behind him, "but I cannot be sure how much sound carries from the mine into the compound. I am always quiet."

He looked intently at Julia, then Stephen. They nodded. He turned, seized a tall bush, and began shaking it. He wrestled with it until it tucked in on itself, revealing a gaping black hole. Julia realized with a start that they were standing at the base of a cliff, so dark and protected she had not seen it at all. The mine opening began about four feet above the ground and rose like a screaming mouth for six feet. Irregularly elliptic, with rounded edges, it looked more like a cave than something man-made.

Tate hoisted himself into that blackness and for a moment disappeared. He reemerged, as if from a pool of ink, to offer Julia his hand. She clicked on her flashlight and saw that the mine opened up as it moved into the mountain. Rotted timbers lay on the floor, among stones, dirt, filaments of abandoned spiderwebs, and animal droppings. Stephen fell in beside her, tugging at his own flashlight, which didn't want to leave his belt.

"This is as far as I go," Tate whispered.

ninety

"The men need me," Tate said. "More important, I have

something with Rosa I'm not ready to give up yet."

He was silhouetted in the mine's opening, hunched slightly but seeming agile and strong, ready to embark on an adventure he had already declined. Smoke swirled around his head, giving Julia the impression that it was he, not his cigar, that was burning.

"You do what you have to do," she said. "We appreciate what you've already done for us."

He squatted and motioned for them to take positions near him. He flipped up the face of his watch, revealing a compass. He tore the Velcro strap away and handed the device to Stephen. Then he shrugged off the knapsack and gave that to him as well. Retreating back through the mine was their best bet, he explained, if they could get there undetected. He would mark the way back to the truck, where he'd wait as long as possible. If they were under heavy fire, he suggested stealing one of the compound's vehicles and plowing through the front gates.

"If worse comes to worst," he continued, turning away to blow out a stream of smoke, "run like madmen into the jungle. Head south-by-southwest. When you hit water, go downstream. Before then, though, you'll encounter an electric chain-link fence. Find a tree with an overhanging branch to get past it." He thought for a moment. "Oh, and if they do chase you into the jungle, do not use your gun."

"Explain," Julia said.

"Emilio's men used to snipe into the compound from the jungle. They'd take someone out, then fade into the jungle. Back again to kill again, then gone again. It makes the target area virtually useless and frazzles the enemy's nerves."

"What happened?"

Tate took an angry draw on his stogie, then flicked the glowing stub into the sunlight. "They installed these anti-sniper contraptions. One shot and these things shoot back—with lots of firepower. I called a friend of mine, still in SAS. He said they're probably Deadeyes. They monitor the perimeter of the compound, just waiting for some fool to fire a rifle or a pistol, any small arms."

"And when someone does?"

"It's the last thing they ever do. These Deadeyes track the trajectory of the projectile, calculate it back to the point of origin, then make anything at that point of origin disappear—by way of heavy aircraft artillery—all within three seconds of the shot."

Stephen exhaled heavily.

Julia shifted her weight, thinking. "Does that mean anyone chasing us can't shoot either?"

"Not necessarily." His words came laced with the ashy odor of tobacco. "According to my mate, the Deadeyes can be programmed to monitor specific regions, so troops behind them can shoot toward an enemy without triggering the Deadeyes. Handheld remotes control them. They can be turned on and off and redirected instantly. Acoustic and electro-optical sensors identify muzzle-flash signatures, so grenades or firecrackers won't distract them. They're very sophisticated and very dangerous."

Stephen asked, "Didn't your friend wonder what this place was doing with these things?"

Tate shook his head. "I know of an oil sheik with his own fully armed Harrier jet. A Colombian drug lord has a German Leopard tank, top of the line. None of this stuff is as regulated as civilians would like to think."

Julia stood, feeling the weight of the Sig Sauer at the small of her back. "Let's do it, then."

Still crouching, Tate pointed with a chiseled arm. "Go straight back. When you think you must have gone too far, keep going. You'll see the metal door I told you about first. Little farther, you'll find rungs on the left wall. They lead to a hatch inside the compound." He described the surface topography radiating from the hatch: jungle behind, Quonsets before. He told what he knew of the surface guards, their number, stations, and routines. He gave directions to the stairs.

"Beyond that, you're on your own," he finished.

"Uncharted territory," Stephen said.

"Good lu—" He stopped, then gripped Stephen's shoulder firmly, shook his head. "To hell with luck. God be with you." He turned his eyes to her. "Both of you."

At that moment, Julia realized how intensely he wanted to join them, to go all the way and damn the torpedoes. He'd witnessed the mournful aftermath of countless abductions, attended the funerals of people who'd gone to the air base for revenge. He'd been waiting for justice a long time. Now someone was going to try. But he knew it wasn't his time, not yet.

She nodded and turned into the black coolness of the mine. Stephen brushed past her, taking point. Ten paces in, she looked back. Tate was squatted like a guardian troll in front of the radiant mouth of the mine, his forearms resting across his knees. She stifled the urge to call out to him, to plead for him to come. She wanted to say, How can we possibly do this without your help? Instead, she followed Stephen deeper into darkness, wondering if this mine would prove to be their River Styx.

When she turned again, Tate was gone.

ninety-one

Stephen braced his feet and hands against the rusty

metal rungs set in the concrete tube that ascended from the mine like a chimney and pushed his shoulder into the manhole cover above him. It rose slowly, sounding like a mason jar when you unscrew the lid. Blinding light sliced into the pitch darkness of the shaft. And something else. The stench of rot—it pierced his nostrils and stung his eyes, perhaps not as effectively as the gaseous irritants cops use to incapacitate suspects, but enough to force shallow breaths and teary vision. Squinting, he made out the source—and also the reason Tate thought this was a safe entrance into the compound: he was behind a trash container roughly the size of an eighteen-wheeler. Sludge oozed down its side and through unseen holes in its bottom, forming pools that collected tissue paper and cans and other refuse the way tar pits entrap animals.

Metal wheels held the container ten inches off the ground, giving him a view of the base beyond. Straight ahead and down a grassy incline were the Quonsets Tate had described. That's where they'd find the stairs into the underground complex—and Allen, Stephen prayed. He looked off to the right, and his heart jumped. There, a hundred yards away, was the entrance gate and a guard shack. They were the first things he recognized from the home movie Despesorio Vero had smuggled out—the second video, which showed the air base. The sense of being here, of having made the journey in search of his brother, made the hair on his arms stand up.

Two guards were talking, submachine guns at their sides. A collection of battered metal trash cans next to the Dumpster nearly shielded Stephen's position. He and Julia would have to be careful when they emerged.

He eased the cover down, pinching off the light. He snapped on his flashlight. Below him, also clinging to the rungs, Julia peered up.

"Can we get to the stairs?" she asked. Her whispers sounded loud in the concrete shaft so near the enemy.

"I think I spotted the building they're in. There are guards at the front gate, within view. I don't see any way to just slip in. We're near a Dumpster. Maybe we can—"

The entire shaft rumbled around them. Flakes of rust rained down from the bottom of the manhole cover. Under Stephen, one end of a rung popped loose, and his foot sailed into Julia's forehead. She lost her grip. For a moment she remained suspended over the fifty-foot drop to the mine floor, her body wedged diagonally in the shaft; her cheek was pushed into the side; her feet fought for traction on the opposite side.

Stephen's flashlight struck the top of her head and tumbled down, strobing until it hit the earth and blacked out. Julia fell and jerked to a stop as Stephen grabbed the shoulder strap of her knapsack. She flailed her arms in the dark until she found the rungs and pulled herself to them.

Above them, sirens sounded.

ninety-two

Karl Litt had just finished scouring Dr. Rankin's blood off his hands and arms and was watching the last pink swirl slip down the drain when the blast quavered through the bathroom. He gripped the edge of the countertop. It felt like the bumper of a very powerful car, ready to roll. The light flickered. He caught his sunglasses as they slipped off the counter. Someone screamed in the hall— impossibly loud. Then he realized it was the base's air raid siren, which Gregor had made functional shortly after they'd leased the base. He yanked his handheld out of his pocket.

"Was ist los!" he yelled. What's happening?

"Air strike!" Gregor answered. "I saw it. One of the hangars went up. A jet. Here comes—"

Another explosion. This time the thunderous sound echoed through the handheld's speaker, breaking up into squeals and static.

Gregor cursed. "They're after the planes," he said. "I just saw Atropos—the Atroposes—heading for the Quonsets. One of the Cessnas got hit. Karl, get out of there. Get—"

The room shook. Static.

"Gregor? Gregor?"

Litt bolted from the bathroom and headed for the bedroom door. The monitor on the dresser showed several people running past in the hall. He tripped over something and fell to the floor. He got to his knees, and his handheld jangled, an incoming call. Without looking at it, he answered.

"Gregor?"

"Hello, Karl," Kendrick Reynolds said.

Litt glanced around the darkened room, half expecting to see the old man standing there, grinning down at him.

"I'm surprised how quickly we found your number," Kendrick said. "Once we knew where to look."

Litt rose to his feet. He had always believed Kendrick's assault, if ever he found Litt, would entail an elite division of commandos quietly killing its way into the compound and slipping into the subterranean complex to kidnap or murder the evil Karl Litt. Explosions didn't fit the model.

"Karl?"

"I'm here." He opened his bedroom door. The corridor fluorescents appeared unaffected. Several were out and others flickered, but they'd been like that as long as Litt could recall. Squinting against the light, he remembered the sunglasses in his hand and slipped them on. The siren blared, piercing his ears.

"You don't think you'll get away, do you?" Kendrick asked. "The sort of air strike we have planned for you will take some time, but I assure you, it's quite comprehensive. The explosions you're feeling now are merely a prelude. My advisors thought it would be prudent to knock out any aircraft you have in the hangars. Next, we'll pelt the surface above your head with earth-penetrating tomography bombs. Those will give the Vikings flying at forty thousand feet with their ESM suites and Inverse-Synthetic Aperture Radar clear pictures of the area's subterranean architecture. We'll see your underground complex as if it were topside."

Litt stopped moving down the corridor. "How . . ."

The sirens stopped.

Kendrick said, "That's better. Did your alarms stop because of a lull in our bombing? I'm sure the next wave will commence shortly."

"How did you figure the underground part?" Litt asked. He could not imagine that Despesorio's information was so detailed.

"You got sloppy, Karl. You let a tracking device get in."

That thing inside Allen Parker. It must be more sophisticated than the devices he had surgically installed in his staff—always under the guise of repairing an "accidental" injury. His could not be detected under so much earth and concrete, and they did not provide the altitude relative to ground level. Leave it to Kendrick to have the best.

He pressed the handheld into his face until his cheek and ear hurt. It was Gregor who had become sloppy, inviting Atropos. He hoped that last interrupted transmission from him marked his death.

"After the Vikings get a handle on the layout, we'll send in the F-15s. They'll drop GBU-28 bombs. You know about those, Karl? Bunker Busters? Forty-seven hundred pounds. Designed to punch through packed earth and twenty-two feet of reinforced concrete before exploding. Boggles my mind, the weapons we have these days. FA-18 Hornets will sweep in next. They'll cover the whole area— especially inside the smoking craters—with Maverick missiles and napalm. That stuff burns at 3,000 degrees, Karl, enough to make your germ just . . . disappear. Want to know what's next?"

Litt ran an arm over the perspiration on his forehead. All the lab doors were open, the workers gone. He went into his private lab, where he squatted in front of a cabinet and opened it, revealing a safe.

The floor shook, a prolonged vibration that cracked the tile. Explosions rumbled in the distance, deep and low. If Kendrick had faithfully described the attack, either the tomography bombing had started or they were still striking at the hangars and the assassins' Cessnas. He hoped the Hummer he had stashed in the jungle was small enough and distant enough to escape the bombing. He hoped he could get to it before the serious ordnance rained down. He hoped he wouldn't stumble into the ground troops Kendrick would surely send in last.

And while he was hoping, he hoped to someday see Kendrick feel the bite of his germ and watch him as he died.

"How can you do this?" he asked. "You're bombing a foreign country."

"Haven't you heard? You're operating the largest methamphetamine laboratory in the world there. Side things too—refined cocaine hydrochloride, heroin, marijuana, a little money laundering for the Colombian and Bolivian cartels. All kinds of nasty stuff we created the Anti-Drug Abuse Control Commission to stamp out. Considering how much anti-drug money Paraguay and Brazil get from us, they were more than happy to cooperate."

Inside the safe was a Halliburton briefcase. Litt pulled it out and stood. Its heft made him feel a little better.

"You realize," Kendrick said, "you might have gotten away if you'd have left the president's family out of your plans. Without his authorization, I would have had to send hired guns. And we've seen recently how ineffective they can be."

"Das gebrabbel. Make sense, Kendrick." He headed for the stairs.

"You could have targeted me without hearing so much as a raised voice." A pause. The clinking of ice against glass near the receiver. The old Schlauberger was having a cocktail. "My time's almost up anyway."

Footfalls slapping against the tile startled him. He turned as a man ran past, lab coat flapping. The man rounded the next corner, going for the exit.

Litt moved the handheld closer to his ear and heard, ". . . was the only thing that allowed me to move so quickly."

"What? What was?"

"Hold on a mo—"

Litt heard him speak to someone. The background noise was a cacophony of voices, some raised in excitement, others droning out information. Litt grew incensed at the thought that Kendrick's room hummed with the activity of his, Litt's, destruction.

After a moment, Kendrick came back on. "Excuse me, Karl. We have a lot going on."

He pictured Kendrick's smug expression. He said, "Du willst mich wohl fiir dumm! This isn't over, Kendrick. You're too late."

"You mean your hit list? The people you infected? Yes, your bitterness, your vengeance, will be felt, if that pleases you. But that's where it ends, Karl. You will have killed them in vain. The media will assume some cult infected them through a contaminate in their food or drink or injected them and then sent out a list of victims. Cruel, but nothing else. They will never hear from you. They will never know why." He paused, then added, "We'll probably frame a militant group, take them out of the picture, and make our citizens feel safe again. In a few years, even their grief will fade."

Litt arrived at the door to the laboratory wing. He moved his face to the facial thermogram. Nothing happened. His heart wedged in his throat. He looked into the black pane again, his reflection glaring back. The door clicked open. As he started up the stairs, he said, "I'll save you a spot in hell, old man."

"You do that, Karl."

He heard a click on the line, then nothing. He growled and shoved the handheld into his pocket. At the top of the stairs, he pushed through the door into the sun and the sound of droning planes.

ninety-three

Convinced they had been spotted and fired upon by a guard with some sort of monster-gun, Julia and Stephen scuttled back down the chimney as fast as they could. Julia anticipated her next moves: roll away from the ladder to make room for Stephen; grab the flashlight; draw the Sig Sauer; run like hares for the adit. Stephen clambered down right above her.

He was counting—"Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen."

"What's that?" she asked, breathless, thinking he somehow knew when the next assault would strike.

"Rungs," he said. "Nineteen, twenty. Trying . . . not to . .. panic. Now shhh. Twenty-three, twenty-four . . ."

Her feet touched dirt and she rolled away.

"Thirty-one, thirty-two!"

She grabbed him and started tugging.

"Wait, wait, wait," Stephen said.

Julia shook the flashlight and it lit up. She centered it on the hole in the mine's ceiling where the shaft rose to the surface.

"Shouldn't we have heard something by now if they were after us?" he said.

Overhead, the siren stopped. Then another sound, thunderlike, and the ground vibrated. Dirt sprinkled from the ceiling.

"That was an explosion," Julia said.

"Is this Kendrick Reynolds's doing?"

She shrugged.

"We gotta get Allen out of there," he said, stripping off his gloves, unraveling the tape at his ankles and wrists. Julia did the same, then yanked the beanie off her head. Stephen was already heading back up. He rammed his shoulder into the manhole cover, heaving it to the side and hoisting himself up and out.

Julia followed, coming up behind the Dumpster. Smoke spiraled into the sky. She peered around the big trash container. A hangar was torn and smoking. It was at the far end of the airstrip near three small jets. One of the jets was missing a wing and rested on its nose, its tail angling up like a sinking ship. It was leaning against one of the other planes.

A fighter roared in, dropping dozens of what looked to Julia like bowling balls. They struck the cluster of jets and another hangar, setting off a chain reaction of explosions.

"Guards," Stephen said.

He was standing behind her, looking in a different direction. She followed his gaze to two guards by the gate and guard shack. They were huddled together, crouched low, casting wide eyes at the plane flying away. When it disappeared, they scanned the grounds, perhaps hoping for someone to tell them how to interpret this new event. One of them held a walkie-talkie to his mouth, yelling into it. A crash of metal caught their attention.

Julia turned also. A half dozen people had come through a door at the end of a Quonset hut and were streaming toward the gate.

"That's the Quonset Tate said the stairs were in," she said.

Stephen brushed by her.

"Wait!"

But he was gone, around the container and jogging down a small hill toward the huts. She started after him, then stopped when one of the guards raised his submachine gun. She yanked her pistol out of her waistband. She had the guard's head in her sights when he slipped away. She watched him apparently decide that the fleeing workers knew something he didn't. He turned and trotted through the gate, machine gun bobbing on its strap at his side. His buddy watched him go, then followed.

Stephen intersected the group of evacuees. He reached out, grabbed two handfuls of white lab coat, and lifted its occupant off the ground. He spoke, the man shook his head no, and Stephen dropped him on his backside. He snagged another man, got another negative response. She couldn't make out his words, but she knew the theme: Where's my brother?

Cautious—more cautious than Stephen, at least—she started for him. She kept her gun at her side and her finger flat against the trigger guard.

His latest captive pointed and must have indicated knowledge of Allen's location; Stephen swung the hapless soul around like a doll, clasped him in a headlock, and marched him toward the Quonset door.

Julia picked up her pace.

Suddenly from behind one of the other Quonsets stepped Atropos. He saw Stephen and his captive go through the door and started after them. Julia raised her weapon, taking aim at the killer. Another group of people came out the door, blocking her shot. Atropos was almost there. She raised her aim and shot the light fixture hanging over the door.

Atropos spun, backing away as he did, quick as a cat. He pivoted his left arm up and immediately squeezed off a round into a woman who had darted in front of Julia. The people broke into a dance of frenzied activity and hysterical screams. Two more Atroposes came around a corner. They reached their brother and advanced toward her as one. She ran to the side of the Quonset, running toward the rear with all of her strength, hoping they didn't reach the corner behind her too soon.

ninety-four

Heart blockage in the early stages of Ebola infection is a blessing. It saves the patient from the agony of feeling his organs melt away, of watching his flesh blister, swell, and split, of hearing his own screams until his throat wears out or fills with blood and bile. It comes from the same well of good fortune that drowns a man before he is eaten by sharks, or poisons a spy with a capsule of strychnine under the tongue before his enemy breaks out the tongs and cattle prods.

Allen Parker's heart was granting him this mercy—winding down, responding to the Ebola virus, which was attacking and short-circuiting the electrical impulses of his atrioventricular node. His breathing became shallow and labored. But the pain continued. His hands, which had been roaming his body looking for a way to snuff the fires that scorched him in a thousand places, slowed and stopped.

And with each minute, his heart dropped a few more beats, until—

No pain. Just like that, it was gone.

The little man in Stephen's grasp had stopped squirming

and now walked obediently ahead of him. With each explosion—

reaching them as muffled thunder and the trembling of the staircase they descended—Stephen thought he was going to bolt. But they were heading down into the subterranean complex, and the man wanted out of it—a direction Stephen blocked.

At the base of the staircase, his unwilling guide stepped up to a black tile in the wall, and the metal entry door clicked open. The man tugged at it and stepped into a poorly lighted corridor.

Stephen's nostrils flared at the redolence of earth and dust. He looked for signs that the corridor was dangerous, then stopped looking; safe or not, he was going in.

The man marched stiffly until they reached an intersection. He paused and selected the right-hand passage. They approached a door with a small square window showing brighter light on the other side. Before reaching it, they turned down another corridor.

Stephen, his big paw clamped around the back of the man's neck, gave him a shake. "No tricks."

"Please . . ." the man said. He pointed weakly in the direction they were heading. Finally he stopped in front of a door.

"Open it," Stephen commanded.

The man threw back a rusty bolt, turned the door handle, and dropped straight to the floor, out of Stephen's grasp. He rolled away, stood, and ran.

"Hey!" Stephen took two steps toward him, stopped. He looked back at the door. Light from inside sliced into the corridor from a thin breach. He pushed on the door.

A cardiac monitor's C-sharp rhythm of ventricular fibrillation struck him like a bad smell: heart failure on the brink of flatline.

And then the visual assault: a man lying in a near-black pool on the floor, a blossom of blood in the center of his torso. And Allen sprawled on a cot, mouth agape, one eye swollen shut, the other staring blindly at the ceiling.

"Oh no, no, no . . ."

Stephen's heel hit the pool and flew out from under him. His head cracked against the tile. He stared at the caged light in the ceiling, thinking for a moment that he was supposed to see something fantastic in it. Then he rolled his head backward and saw an upside-down version of the doorway and the dark corridor beyond. He rose from the gore, blood clinging to him from his armpit to his knee. He rubbed his head and went to his brother.

"Allen! Allen!" He shook Allen's shoulders, sickened by the way his head bounced limply and lolled to the side. "No, Allen! Not here, man! Don't give them the satisfaction!"

He aimed his fist at Allen's sternum and administered a precordial thump. The heart responded—slightly. He tilted Allen's head back, pinched the nostrils, and blew twice into his mouth, filling Allen's lungs. He found the base of the sternum and moved up two fingers. His hands nearly covered Allen's chest. He leaned over and pushed down . . . came up . . . pushed down . . . came up—pumping the heart for him. After thirty compressions, again he filled Allen's lungs.

The cardiac monitor fell silent, then beeped. Allen hitched up, gasping for breath, righting against Stephen's hands.

"Yes!" Stephen said and threw his arms around his brother.

Allen went limp. His head flopped back, and once again, the EKG machine took over the job of screaming for help in a sporadic, weak rhythm.

Stephen gave him another precordial thump and restarted CPR . . . two breaths . . . thirty compressions . . . breathing . . . pushing . . . He had to restrain himself from frantically pumping on Allen's chest without rhythm or meter. He wanted to force life back into him. Tears flew from his cheeks, splattering against Allen's bloody face. He pulled in a deep breath, gritted his teeth, and pushed.

Allen heaved up, gasping. Stephen reached behind his head.

"Allen! Stay with me."

The cardiac monitor beeped . . . beeped . . .

Allen seized Stephen's shoulders and hitched in two sharp, raspy breaths . . . then nothing . . . He fell limp again.

This time, there was no response to the precordial thump. Stephen scanned the room. No defibrillator. His eyes roamed the clutter scattered on the floor: X-ray film, surgical instruments, rolls of cloth tape . . . ampoules of medicine and syringes.

He swung off Allen's cot and dropped to his hands and knees on the floor. He snatched up an ampoule and read its label. Magnesium sulphate 8 mmol. Sometimes used during resuscitation, but under what conditions? He tried to remember. Administering CPR was one thing—kids learned that. Injecting drugs to restart a heart was something else completely—despite being seven credit hours away from earning an MD. Potassium chloride was a good example. Depending on the cause of the heart failure, potassium could either restart it or frustrate efforts that would otherwise work.

He kept scooping up and examining ampoules, hoping a solution would spring out at him.

Epinephrine. Adrenaline!

He found a syringe, loaded it up with the epinephrine, and gently injected the drug under Allen's tongue, which would cause it to work as quickly as an intravenous line. He breathed into him, then rose, his straight arms coming together over Allen's sternum. This time, as he pumped, he did not count. He prayed.

Acutely aware of the heart under his palms, he thought of the life that was slipping away. He remembered Allen the toddler who'd scribbled with Crayons on the walls . . . the eight-year-old who had crashed his bike, knocking out a tooth, and who had run to his brother for comfort instead of to Mom . . . the new teenager who'd shyly asked Stephen what it was like to kiss a girl. . . the young man who'd performed a near-perfect backflip on the living room floor when he received his acceptance to med school—only "near perfect" because after landing he had crashed down on an antique coffee table, obliterating it. He recalled his brother's face when—

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Allen pulled in heavy gulps of air. His eyes were open, but they were focused on something distant. Tears buckled on his lids, spilled over. He reached out blindly, felt Stephen's face and shoulder, and slid his arms around his brother's body, pushing his face into his chest.

Stephen hugged him in return and watched the EKG monitor. The rate was slow but steady. His vision blurred. He blinked away his own tears; they seeped into his beard and tickled his face.

"What happened?" Allen asked, the words scraping over his vocal cords like pebbles. "Where was I?"

Stephen squeezed him tighter. His hands and arms felt too much of Allen's skeleton. He said, "Maybe heaven, little brother. But heaven can wait for you. I got you now."

Allen pushed back to look into Stephen's eyes. He touched Stephen's face, as though ensuring himself it was real.

Stephen was stunned by the way Allen's cheeks and eyes sank into his skull, accentuating his cheekbones and jaw. A large rip at the waist of his clothing showed pale skin and a shrunken stomach. He must have lost twenty pounds in the three days since his capture. Finally Stephen's eyes broke away and settled on a bowl of water and a cloth beside the cot. He dipped the cloth into the water and dabbed at Allen's face. The blood washed away, but the tears—constantly replenished— seemed more permanent.

Allen returned to the comfort of his brother's chest. Stephen's arms cocooned him, warming, comforting, protecting. Allen slumped as tension waned and fatigue took hold.

"I thought we'd lost you," Stephen whispered.

An explosion rocked the room. The wire mesh over the light came loose on one side and swung down. Somewhere down the corridor, glass shattered.

Carefully he lowered Allen back onto the bed. His eyes were wide and darting. Stephen had heard that a side effect of adrenaline was short-term hyper-alertness, followed by a crash that comatosed some patients. The alertness could help get Allen out of the compound; they would worry about his crashing later.

He pulled another ampoule out of his shirt pocket, one he'd found earlier: atropine, which would keep Allen's heart rate up and work with the adrenaline to energize him.

He scooped up another syringe, loaded it, and plunged the needle into Allen's arm.

"This'll help," he said soothingly.

Walls shattered in another part of the complex. The sound reverberated through the corridors, which were becoming thick with smoke and dust. He realized that the explosions were infrequent now and sporadically placed—if his own judgment in such matters could be trusted—as if they were probing for something.

"You're doing fine," Stephen said, tossing aside the syringe. He hoisted Allen up, slung him over his shoulder, and stood.

He made only one wrong turn getting back to the exit. The door was locked. Beside it, a black pane was set in the wall. The man who had led him to Allen had put his face up to one like it. He held his own face in front of it, moved it around, tried the door again. Still locked.

This far . . . for nothing.

He had not seen anyone else on this level. The chances of people hiding out here—or of his finding them if they were—were about the same as surviving the bombs pounding overhead.

Then a memory struck him—so full of potential, he held his breath while his mind gnawed on it.

It could work.

He eased Allen down next to a wall. "I'll be right back. I gave you a heavy dose of adrenaline. You all right?"

"Hmmm." Allen raised his eyebrows to show he was. "Feeling . . . a little better."

Stephen took off along the corridor, into air that had taken on the murkiness of pond water. When he returned, Allen rolled an eye at him and grimaced. Behind Stephen, dragged by one foot, came the corpse from Allen's cell. It left an intermittent swath of crimson. Stephen scooped up the body and maneuvered its face into position in front of the glass panel. He turned the head this way and that, backed it away and drew it near. The noise of the explosions escalated. The tremors became quakes. The smoke thickened and stung their eyes.

He laid the body down in frustration, not sure what else to do.

Allen spoke. "Thermal."

"What?"

He said it again.

Stephen looked down at the corpse, wondering where mere disrespect became sacrilege. He straddled the body and began rubbing the face. His hands engulfed it. He was able to stroke all of it simultaneously, from forehead to chin, ear to ear. His thumbs stayed on the bridge of the nose, moving from between the eyes to the tip. He rubbed as vigorously as he dared and tried not to think of the flesh beneath his hands: the chin scratchy with light beard stubble; the lips catching on his palms, the bottom pulling down, the top snarling up, each flipping back on the opposing stroke; the forehead sliding sickeningly over the skull.

He heaved the body up and held the face before the black pane. A bolt inside the door clicked. Gently, he lowered the corpse.

He bent Allen over his shoulder and stepped through. He wondered if another thermal face reader awaited them at the top of the stairs; he turned and held the door with his foot before it could close. He leaned through, got a grip on the dead man's foot, and pulled the body into the stairwell. Then he headed for the surface.

ninety-five

At one time, the air base must have housed a good-sized army, Julia thought. Three rows of Quonset huts were arranged in a grid, with dirt roads running between the rows. A large field and the airstrip separated the Quonsets from a single row of five airplane hangars—now ripped apart and burning. Whatever function the Quonsets once served—barracks, infirmary, mess hall, armory, chapel, administrative offices, warehouses—today they were rusty scraps, like half-buried barrels.

Julia crouched low beside one of the Quonsets, trying to guess the current position of the three assassins who chased her. She assumed they had split up, as they had done in Pedro Juan Caballero. She crept to the edge of the building, peered around. One of the killers was three Quonsets away, boldly strolling her direction, his head cocked to look between each building as he passed. She sprang out, running for the next row. He spotted her, raised his pistol. She squeezed off a round, then another. He didn't dodge away. As far as she could tell, he didn't even flinch. Then she was out of his sight and running full-force to the end of the building. Her plan was simple: lead the Atroposes far away from the stairs, then double back, find Stephen, find Allen, and get out of Dodge before the killers caught up with them.

Or before the bombs pounded them all deep into the Paraguayan soil for archeologists to find a hundred years from now.

She hadn't seen a plane or an explosion for a few minutes. The last one she spotted had been an FA-18 with U.S. insignias—her father had built model jets and she recognized the twin tail fins. It had swooped low without releasing its ordnance. She wondered if the air strike was over. Could its sole intention have been to disable any getaway aircraft? Would the commando team she had hoped Kendrick would send now arrive?

She had reached the opposite corner of the array of Quonsets from the stairs. It was time to circle back around. She had seen only one Atropos since running from them when they first converged on her. That made her more nervous than if they had stayed on her tail. It dawned on her that she had not seen anyone in the past five minutes. The people escaping the base had drained through the gate and were gone. What she wouldn't give to be with them, Stephen and Allen at her side.

She clutched her pistol and ran back along the front of the first Quonset. She stopped at the corner to inspect the space between the buildings, then darted across. She tacked around a stack of wooden crates that leaned against the half-moon facade. Bulging burlap sacks squatted beside it like fat trolls. She crossed the next gap and then ran to the back of the building.

Her progress was slow, but finally she found herself at the rear of the Quonset with the stairs. She came around the corner in a strobe-like dance of deadly efficiency, swinging her pistol toward the door . . . the arching roofs . . . the crates . . . the corners of the buildings . . . She reached the front, kicked through the door, and moved into the stifling darkness. Her pistol covered the near corners . . . the far corners . . . the overhead beams. She stopped, listening.

A plane approached, followed by explosions—dozens, maybe hundreds of them. They didn't sound like the kind of bombs planes dropped, but smaller, like hand grenades. Still, she heard metal ripping and felt the ground tremble.

So the pause had been a mere respite after all. How could Kendrick Reynolds be so cold? She had told him they were heading here to rescue Allen. Was this his idea of taking care of business—eliminating a threat and cleaning up loose ends all at once? She understood that stopping Karl Litt was more important than three civilian lives, more important than a hundred . . . a thousand. She only wished he'd found another way—sending in a pre-strike ground team, for instance, to pull out the innocent. Or did he think there were no innocents in war? As it was, she felt a bit like Slim Pickens riding an H-bomb to Earth.

Picking up the pace, she moved deeper into the shadows and made out a door at the back of the big room. As she approached, it opened. Her gun snapped up. Stephen stumbled out with Allen over his shoulder. She took her finger off the trigger. Stephen's eyes acknowledged her with compassion, but there was no smile. He fell on his one knee and slid Allen off his shoulder. Allen sat like a rag doll for a moment, then slumped onto his side.

Julia gasped, seeing his battered face, the blood everywhere. "What happened?"

"He's bad," Stephen said dismally. He turned pleading eyes on her. "I think they infected him. They . . . Julia, I think he has Ebola." Tears rimmed his eyes, spilled onto his cheeks.

"We'll find help for him," she said, trying to infuse her words with a faith she did not feel. "But we have to go. We have to leave right now."

"I can walk," Allen slurred, pushing himself up. "I can."

Stephen hoisted him by the armpits. Allen struggled to keep his head balanced on his neck, but with an effort Julia took to be equal parts strength and will, he raised his chin, pushed out his chest, and said, "Let's go."

Julia popped her head out the door and looked around. She shuffled out, gun ready. Stephen and Allen sidestepped through the doorway. Allen's foot came out from under him; he overcorrected and fell back into the front wall of the building. A flash of frustration wrinkled his brow. He shook off Stephen's grip, opting to steady himself by keeping only one hand on Stephen's shoulder.

"Same old Allen," Stephen whispered. "Bullheaded as ever."

They started moving south, toward the trash area and the mine-shaft. The ground quaked as Navy thunder pealed over the base, reverberating against the buildings' metal skin. Julia and Stephen realized at the same time that a noise at the end of this thunder was caused by something else—a slamming door behind them.

They turned to see a man darting across the road. He stopped and faced them. Julia's mouth went dry. A fleshless skull was glaring at her. Then she realized the black orbs of the eyeholes were a pair of sunglasses, and the face she thought fleshless was merely gaunt—but extremely so, as though it had gone through the Mayan ritual of tlachaki, in which dried facial skin was stretched over the skull after everything else had been stripped off. Brittle hair, unnaturally silver in sunlight, exploded back from an overly large forehead, framing the head like the halos of saints in Florentine paintings; to Julia, it heightened the sense of sacrilege this figure radiated.

"Litt," Allen said.

Pressed to his chest with both arms was a silver briefcase.

Julia raised the Sig Sauer, but Litt disappeared behind a building.

Julia reversed for the mine, but Stephen caught her arm.

"He had a case. We can't let him go."

"There's no time."

"We can't let him go," he repeated.

"We can't," Allen agreed. He wiped the back of a hand over his lips. "He won't let this die. He'll be back."

"Allen," Julia said, refusing to believe he would pass up the opportunity to get while the getting was good, "going after Litt may mean the difference between getting out alive . . . and not."

"Doesn't matter."

Stephen again: "We can't let him go."

They were right. Oh God, they were right. With bombs crashing down around his head, the only souvenir Litt could possibly want was whatever would allow him to continue his work in viral terrorism— money or formulae or specimens; probably all three.

Without a word, she took off after him.

ninety-six

They charged through the alley toward the large open area that split the base in half. On the other side, in front of one of the hangars, dozens of military vehicles squatted on rubberless rims, rusting. Despite the destruction, Litt had run in this direction.

When they emerged from the alley, Litt was waiting for them. He stood two buildings away, casting a chilling smile. His fingers were massaging the back of the hand that held the briefcase.

She leveled her pistol at him. "Freeze!" she yelled. "Drop the case!"

When he didn't, she repeated the command. Again he ignored her. She wondered if he was concealing a weapon. Slowly, she advanced, Allen and Stephen close behind.

"Shoot him," Allen whispered. His voice was raspy, and he was winded.

They stepped in front of a Quonset door. It burst open, spewing out the Atroposes in a frenzy of gauntleted fists, kicking legs, overwhelming bodies. A black arm lashed out and sent her pistol flying. Julia yelled out in surprise and pain as two of her fingers broke and split open. A hand ensnarled her hair and forced her head back. She swung her arm and hit nothing. She kicked back, felt her captor move

away, and struck nothing. She reached behind her head, found the flexing material of the gauntlet, and realized her efforts there would be pointless.

Let a missile hit us now, she prayed. Just take us all out, whatever good with all this evil.

She heaved forward, realizing in midfall that someone had planted a foot at the small of her back and kicked her away. She hit the ground hard and tumbled. A body fell on top of her—instinctively, she jabbed a fist into it. The man let out a painful breath of air, too labored to be one of the Atroposes. She pushed him off and found his face: Allen. Snapping her head up, she witnessed Stephen in the impossible task of taking on all three Atroposes. He had one pinned under his massive foot against the building's facade, and another in a stranglehold, gripping the killer's neck despite his captive's pounding fists. He had kicked or punched or shoved the third Atropos—this one was reeling back and falling.

Stephen's eyes found Julia's.

"Go!" he grunted. "Stop him!"

She looked quickly and saw Litt running across the field, toward the smoldering hangars. She scanned the ground for her pistol. It was there, among the scuffling feet of Atropos and Stephen.

The killer who'd fallen was up, moving in on Stephen. She leaped up and kicked him. He spun and planted a heel into her sternum. She flew back. Eyes watering from pain, she rolled toward the battle, reaching, feeling for her gun. A booted foot came down on her arm. She screamed and pulled her arm back. She rolled away, rose, cradling her arm.

The Atropos pinned by Stephen's foot writhed in frustration, not quite understanding yet that the weight of his brothers was anchoring Stephen in place. A spiked fist rose from the headlocked Atropos and came down on Stephen's spine.

His eyes slammed shut against the assault. Tears streamed out. He opened his eyes again, found Julia. "Go! Please!"

Litt was nearly at the hangars.

Beside her, Allen struggled to stand. She sensed the tension coiled in his legs and arms, ready to spring at Stephen's attackers. She reached out and touched him. "No, Allen. They'll kill you with one blow."

"I . . . have . . . to!"

Stephen turned a bloody face toward Allen and shook his head. "No, brother. Go. Stop Litt. Don't let this happen again . . ."

The free Atropos took a step for Allen and Julia. Stephen released the neck he had been gripping and seized the collar of the assassin now interested in Allen and Julia, yanking him back. When the man spun to break the grip, Stephen yelled, "You wimp! Just like your punk dead brother!"

Atropos rammed a fist into Stephen's face. The struggling escalated: the movements came faster, the blows harder.

Backing away, Julia saw the Atroposes as something other than individual killers. Though encased in their own skins, they moved in unison, as one creature: one pulling back as another stepped in . . . gripping and releasing like the tentacles of a violently malicious monster. And she realized another thing: they all wanted a piece of Stephen; they all wanted to be part of the kill. In the destruction of their enemies, they were of one mind, one body. They would descend on each of them with a unified, incomprehensible wrath.

She pulled at Allen, aware that she was leaving Stephen to die. They would all perish if they tried to rescue him. And he would die for nothing.

No, she thought. She couldn't leave so easily. She dived for her gun, dodging the kicks, the stomps. Her uninjured hand reached out, grabbed the barrel. She rolled back, back, then up, turning the gun in her hand. She pointed, focused. All three Atroposes stood behind Stephen—a gauntleted arm circling his neck, gloved hands pulling his arms back at horrendous angles, another hand coming from between his legs to grip a thigh. Julia recalled Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction, and Stephen was caught in its many arms. Its necklace of skulls were the faces of the Atroposes, peering wickedly over Stephen's shoulders and around his body. They jostled, shielding themselves.

"Go," Stephen pleaded again, his voice weak and raspy, and her heart ached at the realization that she must obey. It would be crueler not to.

Her fingers, bent grotesquely backward, throbbed and spewed blood. Her forearm felt as though a truck had parked on it, but she pushed the pain down into a black well, where its screams for attention echoed flatly and carried no weight.

She could not get another clear shot. She recognized determination in Stephen's eyes. He wanted everything they'd gone through to matter. Allen's trauma; her efforts and grief; Donnelley's death; the deaths of so many others, ones they knew about and more they didn't; Stephen's own . . . offering now—he wanted it all to make a difference, if not to bring good, then to stop evil. She understood. And she knew hesitating would ruin it all, would make futile the blood and tears. She lowered the pistol and gave him a soft nod. She was biting her lip, reopening the wound, tasting the blood. She felt like a small child trying to be brave.

He attempted a smile, but his quivering lips could not hold it. So he held her eyes a moment longer and nodded back, firm, sure.

Again she pulled at Allen. He stood on shaky legs and let her take some of his weight. Then she started backing away.

"No, wait," Allen pleaded.

"We have to stop Litt," she whispered without taking her eyes off Stephen and his captors. The Atroposes stared, knowing they had won.

"I can't leave him," Allen said. "Not like this."

"It's what he wants, Allen. If we don't go now, we won't stop Litt and Stephen will have—" She restructured the thought. "All of this will be in vain."

"Stephen! I love you!" he cried.

And Stephen did smile, a big ain't-everything-just-dandy grin. It was ecstasy to witness, a cool shower on sweat-soaked skin. Julia thanked him silently for that. Then she tugged again at Allen. He yielded and took a few steps backward with her. He turned away then, apparently wanting to remember the smile, not the aftermath.

One of the Atroposes aimed his pistol at them. Stephen noticed and knocked his forehead into the weapon. He head-slammed the Atropos directly behind him, managed to pull an arm free, then a leg. He grabbed, punched, kicked, and berated the three Atroposes into leaving the other two alone for now. She had the idea. This, after all, was not for pay; this was personal. No one cared whether this "hit" was clean and quick. They cared that it was messy and drawn out. And their arrogance, borne of a skill that could do nothing but breed arrogance, would convince them they could take their prey at their leisure. Never mind the air strike; they were here for revenge.

"He's getting away," Allen said, his voice flat.

She turned and saw Litt crossing in front of a hangar. She squeezed off three rapid shots. Small explosions erupted in the dirt around him. He jerked to a stop, turned, and fell. He scooped the case up and disappeared into the space between two hangars.

"Slowed him down," Allen rasped.

"We have to move faster."

"Go on ahead of me. I'll catch up."

But before she could stop herself, she glanced back. Her blood congealed. Stephen was on his knees. An Atropos was holding each of his arms straight out from his body, crosslike. Another Atropos stood behind him, raising a gauntleted fist, focused on the back of Stephen's head. Her heart kicked against her breastbone. She swung the pistol around, but too late. The gauntlet came down, firm and straight as a piston.

Stephen crumbled. The two holding him let go, and he fell: no resistance, no spasms, no life.

Julia let loose an animal roar that rubbed her throat raw and rose to the pitch of the siren so that it seemed to go on and on long after she closed her mouth. The Atroposes, standing around their downed foe, rotated their heads to peer at her. It was one thing to accept death, quite another to see it. She tried to steady the heavy weapon it held and pulled the trigger. Again. And again. After five wild shots, she forced her finger to stop. Her shots had not stirred the Atroposes at all; they stood like wax figures, staring.

She spun away from them. She caught up with Allen, who was stumbling and falling, loping across the field. She was nearly panting, afraid she'd never draw enough air again.

"Is he—?" he asked.

"Don't look back." She hitched in a breath. Ten rounds, she thought, her mind flailing for something sturdy. No, eleven. The first took out the light above Atropos's head. Then two as she ran from Atropos, three at Litt, and five more at Stephen's killers. Eleven. The Sig held thirteen rounds, plus one in the chamber. She had three left. Enough to turn Litt inside out.

She bolted for the gap between the hangars.

ninety-seven

Karl Litt loped behind the hangars. Off in the jungle, not far from the last hangar, was a shed that housed his Hummer. He could feel the heat of the burning hangars and smell the smoke. Flecks of ash fluttered in his eyes, and he brushed them away. The perimeter fence was a mere thirty yards to his right, and just beyond he could see trees ablaze like pillars of fire. If he had gauged the air strikes correctly, Kendrick's screaming war machine had completed phase two, the tomography bombs. Somewhere overhead, a plane's radar was reading the results and constructing a map of the underground complex. It wouldn't be long before the last and most destructive attack would begin.

He felt the sting before he heard the shot. Then the fire—his ear was on fire! He dropped his briefcase and grabbed his ear. Felt blood and the ragged, tingling edge where the top of his ear was gone.

I shot his ear off, she thought.

Julia stood watching Litt over the sights of her pistol. Delicate tendrils of smoke seeped from the barrel and the notch of the ejection port. He was touching the wound and probably had no idea what had just happened. She had aimed for the center of his back, and he was only forty yards away; she'd won an Academy tournament on a range ten yards longer. But she was using her injured hand. Extending out the broken middle and ring fingers instead of wrapping them around the grip made for shaky shooting. She bent her elbows and drew the pistol closer to her face. With her left hand supporting her shooting hand, she centered her sights between his shoulder blades.

He turned and raised his hands in surrender.

Her finger tightened on the trigger. She imagined the bullet striking the lapel over his heart. She had the shot.

She let her grip relax, and the barrel dipped. She couldn't do it. She could not shoot an unarmed man in the act of surrendering. Even soldiers took prisoners on the battlefield, didn't they? Wasn't it part of the Geneva Convention? But what would she do with him? If she tied him up or knocked him out or disabled him somehow, he'd die in the air strike. That would be no better than shooting him now. If she took his case and let him escape, would he find a way to continue killing, to perhaps even duplicate the work he'd done here? How would she live with herself then? And if she actually took him in custody, how far would they get—she and the gravely ill Allen—before he got the upper hand and murdered them both?

"You have no choice. Do it."

At first she thought the words were her own, so persuasive as to sound like whispers in her ear. Then she realized they'd come from Allen, who was slowly, painfully moving up behind her. He came into her peripheral vision on her left, scraping along the wall of the hangar, sucking in wet breaths.

"Julia," he groaned. "Think of . . . the deaths . . . he's responsible for. Think of . . . your partner. Think of Ste . . . Ste . . ."

He sobbed then—or coughed; she couldn't tell. But it didn't matter, because she was thinking of Donnelley, she was thinking of Stephen. She braced herself, feeling the muscles in her face, especially around her mouth and brow, pinch tight. She brought the barrel back in line with Litt's chest.

"You'd only be killing yourselves!" Litt called.

She held her position. "Meaning?"

"Meaning—"

His left hand moved—he was holding something. How could she not have noticed? In the moment between seeing the movement and deciding to shoot, she heard a machine kick into gear: clack-clack-clack-clack-clack . . . Fast, like an anchor chain reeling out to the ocean floor. She shifted her vision to see a contraption on the jungle side of the chain-link fence spin around. A Gatling-style cluster of barrels jutting from its body now pointed not out toward the jungle but inward toward them. When it stopped, she continued hearing the sound for a second longer. She turned to see another of these weapons— Tate had called them Deadeyes—pointing its barrels almost directly at her. She remembered Tate saying soldiers controlled them with remotes, and they could be programmed to monitor certain regions around them. She had just witnessed the redirecting of these two, from outward, where a sniper would fire into the compound, to the compound itself, where she and Allen stood. She had no doubt that either Deadeye was capable of blowing them away, regardless of where along this strip between the hangars and the jungle they were.

"Meaning, if you fire your weapon, my mechanical friends will annihilate you both." He smiled and lowered his arms.

Had Tate not warned them of these anti-sniper weapons, she probably would have called his bluff.

He continued: "Their response is instantaneous—"

Three seconds, she remembered.

"—and their field of fire is quite broad. You can't elude them. I've seen people try." As he spoke, he squatted and picked up the silver briefcase. Then he took a tentative step back.

"Just . . . stop!" she screamed through gritted teeth. He did. She took a step forward. He stepped back. Another step for each of them. Her mind had told her she could not shoot him, and she held to that mandate. But she nearly forgot why he was off-limits, and she came within a half pound of trigger pressure of squeezing off a warning round. She pushed the back of her finger against the trigger guard to keep it ready but safe.

"Litt! I said stop! I mean it. Don't think I won't end it all right here, right now."

She walked forward, and this time he held his ground. Behind her, Allen pushed himself along the wall of the hangar.

"Allen, stay there. Don't move."

"If you go, I go," he said weakly. She knew he was referring to a longer journey than the distance to Litt. "Besides, he . . . probably killed me anyway." He spat a red glob into the dirt. "Julia, you can get out of this. I know you can."

"Any ideas?"

"No. But I know you. You'll figure something out."

"You're giving me too much credit. I'm stumped."

They reached a gap between hangars. Allen hesitated and Julia moved close to him, not taking her eyes or her aim off Litt. "You're not up for this," she said.

"I'm feeling better. Really." He groaned, but she thought he did look stronger. Something inside was fighting hard. "Stephen shot me full of adrenaline. I'm feeling it."

"Take my shoulder, but don't jar me too much. If this is it for us, I want to take him along."

"I believe he's going the other direction." He grabbed hold of her and gently shifted a measure of weight to her.

They crossed the gap and he let go to continue his sad slide along the wall. They had halved the distance to Litt. This near, she could make out the blood that coated the remainder of his ear and where he had smeared it on his jaw and neck. It was stark against the whiteness of his face. Closer, she noticed that a scarlet trickle had followed his jawbone and formed a bead on his chin like a tiny goatee. An explosion hurled debris against the hangar hard enough to shake the entire wall, but she resisted the temptation to look. Hot air billowed her hair. The air strike had taken a giant step toward them.

A body length from Litt, she stopped. She pointed her gun at the left lens of his black sunglasses.

"You're not going to use that thing," he said, smiling thinly.

"In a heartbeat."

In her peripheral vision, she saw Allen slide down the wall, grunting when he hit the ground. He held one shoulder out at an uncomfortable angle, as if trying not to completely collapse. His head drooped; he appeared to have spotted something fascinating in the dirt. Litt appraised him.

"Well, Dr. Parker. Did you enjoy your stay with us?"

"You're a sick man, Litt," Julia said, not sure what to do next.

"So I've been told. Something about the pointless death of his family will do that to a man."

"That's what this is about? Revenge?"

"When you put it that way, it does sound petty, doesn't it?"

They were both stalling, trying to figure a way out.

"Other people have lost loved ones. They don't kill thousands in retaliation."

"I'm not other people."

Keeping his lenses pointed at her, he placed the remote control device into the breast pocket of his lab coat.

"Don't move. Not even a finger." Julia said, poking the gun at him. Her upper torso leaned into the movement.

"Or what, you'll shoot? Of course, you could pistol-whip me. Would you like that? Maybe this will dissuade you." His hand came out of the pocket with something that looked like a harmonica—

My mind's not working right, she thought. And if that's true, we're not going to survive.

Then a fat blade snapped out of the end. He held a stiletto.

ninety-eight

Litt began casually stirring the air with the knife.

It looked utterly ridiculous in his bony fingers, but she wasn't going to bet the farm he didn't know how to use it. That he kept it in motion told her something; a moving weapon was the hardest to take away.

"Don't worry, I have no intention of attacking you. I merely desire the same courtesy."

She raced through her options: Shoot and die . . . Jump him and risk the blade . . . Follow him and hope they moved out of the Deadeyes' sensors. The hangars all had people-sized rear doors. Litt could easily back to a door, then duck in and lock it before she could reach him. By the time she raced around, he'd be gone again. Maybe he had a plane waiting. Or a car. Something with bulletproof windows and bulletproof everything. If she attacked, he might cut her down and get away. The only certain way to stop him was to shoot.

But he didn't move; he watched her.

"You're the one, aren't you?" he said. "The information on the chip. You modified it. Hacked it, as they say."

She felt herself smile.

"Oh, you are cunning. The president's family was never targeted. You added them."

"As you said, best not mess with a man's family."

A plane flew over, followed by a tremendous explosion. It had hit well away from them, where the Quonsets were or even farther. Still, the ground shook hard enough to make Julia's feet unsteady for a few moments. Silt and ash drifted down on them. A hot wind blew past.

"Kendrick's final wave," Litt announced. "Annihilation of the base. We'd better resolve this, don't you think?"

"I'm not letting you leave."

"I can help him, you know." He cocked his head at Allen. "All of them."

"What are you talking about?"

"Ebola. I have the cure."

She didn't know whether to believe him. She wanted to see his eyes, but his glasses were too dark.

"It's reversible," he said, "at least in the early stages. Many people have recovered, even after experiencing severe hemorrhagic symptoms. Once the virus is gone, the body repairs itself rather quickly. The cure restores and accelerates intravascular coagulation, which give the endothelial cells time to reform."

She could not risk a glance at Allen, but she knew he looked as if a truck had hit him. That was repairable?

Her doubt must have shown on her face. Litt said, "Even Dr. Parker has a chance. On the scale of heart failure due to the Ebola virus, he is on the early side. His organs have not failed, but his heart is responding to the blood loss and hypotension. He has a chance," he repeated, "with this." He tapped the metal case with his toe.

Then she saw it: movement reflected in his glasses. Silhouettes of legs moving, heads bobbing, a swinging arm. The Atroposes were behind her, approaching slowly.

Litt was stalling, saying, "You can save his life. I'll give you the cure; you let me walk away. Simple as that."

A red light, as small as a paper cut, appeared among the reflected cluster of Atroposes. As it bounced and jiggled, another appeared . . . then another. The laser sites. They were turning on their pistols' lasers, and the smoke was making them visible. She counted three bodies, three lasers.

They won't risk my hearing them. They're going to shoot sooner, not later.

"In fact," Litt said, "I'll get you two out of here, drop you off at the hospital in . . ."

They don't know about the Deadeyes, and Litt isn't going to tell them. Their lives for his . . . what does he have to think about? And they don't care that Litt will go down with me, perhaps killed by the same bullets that kill me. No honor among thieves. Or murderers.

The silhouettes were now indistinguishable from the other shadow-and-light patterns on the lens, but the tiny red beams dancing at their sides were clear as neon. She remembered the shooting styles of the Atroposes she'd seen in action: they didn't pause, they didn't take time to aim. They didn't have to—they were marksmen. When they raised their weapons, they shot. One-second warning. No more.

". . . after that, I started producing antibodies."

"What?"

"It comes from my blood. The cure."

His glasses reflected what she had been waiting for: the lines of lasers rose and shortened as the Atroposes raised their pistols. The short lines of the beams became pinpricks.

"Cure this," she said and dropped to the ground.

The silenced weapons spat and popped.

Litt screamed. His blood splashed over her. The knife spiraled out of his hand and clanged against the metal hangar wall—a cymbal clash over the dull tones of bullets plunking into the same wall. As soon as his body hit the ground, she flipped around to face the Atroposes.

They stood in a tight group, their arms straight out in front, clutching pistols that smoked and projected arrows of red light over her head. They shared an expression of vague shock. Then all six eyes flicked to her and the laser beams lowered. The high-pitched whine of motors caught their attention. In unison, they rotated their heads toward the sound.

For the only time since seeing them together, Julia witnessed a disunity in their actions. Two began swinging their pistols toward the nearest Deadeye; the other reeled back, trying to shift his feet into hyperdrive.

The Deadeyes roared and vanished in billows of smoke. The Atroposes disappeared too. In a chunky mist of black and red. Sparks flashed as round after round pinged off their pistols. There were so many sparks, she thought later the gauntlets must have been made of metal as well. The men seemed to blur backward, like inked figures smeared by the artist's hand.

She closed her eyes.

The Deadeyes stopped firing. Their barrels continued to spin; they sounded like dentist's drills. Something wet smacked against the ground.

She turned away and cautiously ventured into the world of vision. Allen was sitting against the wall, one leg completely off the ground in a posture of defense. His hands gripped his head because they had nothing else to do. His mouth gaped in a silent scream. Moving in miniscule increments, his eyes—too big for his face—settled on her. His mouth closed on a frown, then a bruised tongue poked out and slid over his lips. He swallowed. His hands remained in the air. He started to speak, stopped. Another swallow.

"Did you actually say," he asked, wheezing out a thin chuckle, "cure this?"

ninety-nine

She had been gone no more than three minutes, and

when she returned Allen was still propped against the wall. He bore a numb, dull expression and was staring at the spot where the Atroposes had finally met their match. She had tried to avoid glimpsing any of that particular carnage, but the Deadeyes had done their job so thoroughly, everywhere she looked she saw

something

of the former assassins.

"They're just gone," he said. "They were here and now they're not. What kind of person creates a thing that can do that?" He looked up at her. "You lost your jacket. You covered him up?"

She nodded. Her eyes were red and swollen, her cheeks still wet. "I had to be sure. What if he was . . . somehow . . . ?"

"I can't imagine those monsters walking away from any adversary who still drew breath."

She picked up Litt's case and sat down beside Allen. The bombs were raining down now, pouring into craters where the Quonsets had been. They had to leave quickly, but an equally pressing needed demanded her attention. She squared Litt's case on her lap. There was a single drop of blood near the handle.

She said, "Was he telling the truth, do you think?"

473

"One way to find out."

She could tell he was in great pain. His breathing sounded sloppy and wet. Still, he displayed more vigor than he had ten minutes before. Eyeing Litt's body, sprawled flat on its back an arm's reach away, she understood how he felt. She hoped he could hold on to the energy awhile longer. She worried about her ability to carry him to safety if he couldn't walk.

She took a deep breath, popped the latches, and opened the case. Mounted to the inside of the lid were two rows of stainless steel vials. Small labels identified their contents: "Ebola Kugel 4212A"; "Ebola Kugel 521 IF"; "Ebola Kugel 3294B" . . . The last one on the right was twice the size of the others. "EK Antiserum."

"That's it," Allen said.

"Do you think it's an actual antidote, not just his blood? Doesn't it take years to develop?"

"He told me he had an antidote. Antiserum's the same thing."

The bottom portion of the case contained a square metal box, what appeared to be bankbooks, passports, identification, and other documents. She opened the box. Inside were roughly two dozen memory chips in plastic cases.

"The formula for Ebola Kugel?" she wondered.

"Or digitized DNA records. Blackmail material. Financial transactions. Could be anything."

A jet streaked overhead, low. A thunderous blast shook the hangar. They realized it had emanated from the front of the hangar, much closer than the others.

She slammed the lid closed. "Come on."

"Wait." With some difficulty, he reopened the case, plucked three vials of Ebola from the metal tongs that held them, and tossed them toward Litt's body.

"Don't—" She stopped herself. Of course he was right. Nothing good could ever come from those vials. She reached in, removed the remaining vials—all but the antiserum—and tossed them onto Litt's chest.

"You think they'll be destroyed?" Allen asked.

A missile shrieked into the jungle and exploded. Noises of a million varying pitches and tones collided with each other, forming one bellowing scream.

"Witness the wrath of Kendrick," she said. "If he wanted to take down Litt and get his research, he'd have sent in a platoon of commandos." She thought a moment. "Actually, that's what I expected. No, he wants Litt and his germ destroyed. He won't stop until this entire place is a wasteland. Bet on it."

She removed the memory chips from the case and tossed those too. She pulled out the documents. He stopped her. From the sheaf in her hand, he extracted a stack of hundred-dollar bills. It must have been three inches thick.

"For Stephen's church," he said. He dropped the money back into the case and pushed against the wall to stand.

She closed the case and stood. As she reached for Allen, an explosion rocked the ground and she toppled into him. They hit the dirt hard. Then the neighboring hangar blew apart. Roiling clouds of fire and smoke flung jagged panels of sheet metal and twisted beams into the air. The hangar they leaned against lost a wall and started collapsing.

"Hurry!" She pulled Allen's arm around her shoulder and heaved him forward in a stumbling run.

On the other side of the chain-link fence, a huge tree instantly ignited and crashed down, crushing one of the Deadeyes and a section of fence. Heated air shoved them against the wall. Allen yelled out in pain and dropped to one knee, but he pressed on. She could feel him drawing determination from his physical distress, turning the agony into fuel that powered his fight for survival.